More than 1,300 critically endangered land snails have been released in the Ilhas Desertas (Desert Islands) archipelago off the Moroccan coast.

The reintroduction of the tiny molluscs to their native habitat followed the rescue of two obscure species of the snail from the edge of extinction, reported The Guardian. The snails hadn’t been recorded for over a century and were thought to have disappeared.

“If it goes as well as we hope, more snails will follow them next spring. It’s a huge team effort which shows that it is possible to turn things around for highly threatened species,” said Gerardo Garcia, curator of lower vertebrates and invertebrates at Chester Zoo in the United Kingdom, as the BBC reported.

The pea-sized molluscs are native to mountainous Deserta Grande island, southeast of Madeira. Their habitat was destroyed by invasive mice, rats and goats that had been brought there by humans.

A wild refuge for the snails was restored on neighboring Bugio Island, where the invasive species were eradicated.

The reintroduction plan was coordinated by biologist Dinarte Teixeira with the Instituto das Florestas e Conservação da Natureza (IFCN) as part of the conservation program Help Desertas Snails, reported Madeira News. Participants in the effort included the Chester and Bristol Zoos and Mossy Earth in the UK, France’s ZooParc de Beauval and the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Atlantic Islands Invertebrate Specialist Group.

Four additional preliminary reintroduction projects are planned for 2025 and 2026. An ongoing monitoring program will analyze the reintroduced snails’ survival rate, as well as their potential impact on the island’s other mollusc communities. The data will be used to measure the conservation program’s success.

IFCN experts rediscovered populations of less than 200 individuals each of two subspecies of the tiny snail during conservation expeditions from 2012 to 2017, The Guardian reported. It had been feared that invasive predators had possibly decimated the species.

The snails were relocated to the zoos in France and the UK. The conservation science team, along with Madeira experts, constructed mini habitats for 60 of the snails at Chester Zoo as part of the breeding program.

“It was a huge responsibility to begin caring for them,” said Dr. Gerardo Garcia, head of ectotherms at Chester Zoo, as reported by The Guardian. “As a zoo conservation community, we knew nothing about them. They’d never been in human care before and we had to start from a blank piece of paper and try to figure out what makes them tick.”

In order to protect Bugio Island’s fragile ecosystem, humans have not been allowed on the island since 1990.

“Within a few months we were able to crack the breeding of the Desertas land snails. Crucially, we were then successful in breeding multiple generations. This was key, because it meant we could then bring in the support of other zoos and establish a network, breeding them in the substantial numbers needed to have a chance of saving the species,” said Heather Prince, Chester Zoo invertebrate specialist, as The Guardian reported.

Each snail that has been reintroduced has an individual monitoring marker. If the effort is successful, many more of the endangered snails will be released.

“These snails are incredibly precious. The Desertas Islands are the only place in the world where they can be found and so we’re striving to do everything we can to give them the best possible chance for the future. For 100 years we thought they’d gone for ever, but now there’s new hope,” Teixeira added.

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More than a third of animals on Earth are herbivores, but since plants don’t have a lot of calories it can be hard for grazers to eat enough to meet their energy needs. To add to the problem, climate change is lowering the nutritional value of certain foods that these plant eaters rely on.

Fossil fuel emissions produced by humans are causing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide to rise, pushing up temperatures worldwide. This is causing plants to grow faster in ecosystems across the globe, research biologist Ellen Welti with the Smithsonian Institution’s Great Plains Science Program wrote in The Conversation.

“Some studies suggest that this ‘greening of the Earth’ could partially offset rising greenhouse gas emissions by storing more carbon in plants. However, there’s a trade-off: These fast-tracked plants can contain fewer nutrients per bite,” Welti wrote in The Conversation.

Welti and colleagues looked at the ways in which nutrient dilution might impact species throughout the food web. They focused on the responses of plant-feeding populations, from giant pandas to grasshoppers.

“When we look at future climate change, it’s not the same as the current hot years that we experience,” said Alex Ruane, co-director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies’ Climate Impacts Group. “If we were to find a location and look at a hot year that was recently experienced, it would likely have been a heat wave that would have raised the overall temperature. Climate change is different. Climate change is every day, a little bit more and more. When those heat waves come [in the future], they’re just a little bit more intense or extreme, and that has a different physiological impact [on plants].”

Welti said changes in plants’ long-term nutritional value could be one underappreciated cause of falling animal populations.

“These changes in plants aren’t visually evident, like rising seas. Nor are they sudden and imminent, like hurricanes or heat waves. But they can have important impacts over time,” Welti said in The Conversation. “Plant-eating animals may need more time to find and consume food if their usual meal becomes less nutritious, exposing themselves to greater risks from predators and other stresses in the process. Reduced nutritional values can also make animals less fit, reducing their ability to grow, reproduce and survive.”

The nutrient value of livestock feed has also been declining. It is often difficult for cattle — who spend much of their time eating — to find enough protein, as protein concentrations are falling across rangelands all over the planet, threatening livestock and ranchers.

Nutrition dilution also affects wild species like some insects.

“Insects are essential members of the web of life that pollinate many flowering plants, serve as a food source for birds and animals, and perform other important ecological services. Around the world, many insect species are declining in developed areas, where their habitat has been converted to farms or cities, as well as in natural areas,” Welti explained. “Many insects are plant feeders that are likely to be affected by reduced plant nutritional value. Experiments have found that when carbon dioxide levels increase, insect populations decline, at least partly due to lower-quality food supplies.”

Leaf-chewing insect species like caterpillars and grasshoppers suffer the most negative impacts, from smaller body sizes to reduced reproduction.

Other insects like cicadas and aphids could benefit from carbon-rich plants.

“Certain types of plant-feeding animals are likely to face greater declines because they need higher-quality food. Rodents, rabbits, koalas, horses, rhinoceroses and elephants are all hind-gut fermenters – animals that have simple, single-chambered stomachs and rely on microbes in their intestines to extract nutrients from high-fiber food,” Welti added.

Welti said more research will be necessary to understand the role of nutrient dilution in the declines of individual species.

“Over the longer term, it will be important to understand how nutrient dilution is altering entire food webs, including shifts in plant species and traits, effects on other animal groups such as predators, and changes in species interactions. Changes in plant nutritional value as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels could have far-reaching impacts throughout ecosystems worldwide,” Welti said.

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Palestinians whose family members were killed in Gaza attacks by Israel during the last 14 months have taken legal action against British oil major BP. They argue that the company’s ownership of the pipeline supplying Israel with oil has been aiding the assault.

The claimants sent BP a “letter before claim” that alleges its actions breach stated human rights commitments under international law, reported The Guardian.

“Israel relies heavily on crude oil and refined petroleum imports to run its large fleet of fighter jets, tanks and other military vehicles and operations, as well as the bulldozers implicated in clearing Palestinian homes and olive groves to make way for unlawful Israeli settlements. Some fuel from refineries goes directly to the armed forces, while much of the rest appears to go to ordinary gas stations where military personnel can refuel their vehicles under a government contract,” the letter states.

BP is the owner and operator of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which Azerbaijan uses to supply Israel with crude oil. The pipeline runs through Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan. From there, the oil is transported via ship to provide 28 percent of the crude oil used by Israel.

Oil from the pipeline has been reported as being sent to a jet fuel refinery for military aircraft that drop munitions on Gaza.

The Palestinian claimants sent their letter a little more than a month following a report published by a coalition of environmentalists that identified the oil company as one of the “top corporate suppliers of oil to Israel,” Common Dreams reported.

“The major international oil companies, including BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies, may be linked to 35% of the crude oil supplied to Israel since October [2023],” the report says. “These companies, as well as state-owned entities and other private and publicly traded oil producers, profit from supplying oil to Israel’s refineries, where a proportion is likely refined into fuels for Israel’s war machine.”

The claimants say BP violated the guiding principles of the United Nations regarding business and human rights, in addition to the prohibition against being complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity under international law and its own policy obligations, which require the oil company not to contribute to human rights abuses, reported The Guardian.

A UN commission found Israel to have committed war crimes during the Gaza conflict, and the UN general assembly has approved immediate ceasefire resolutions in a conflict that has killed at least 45,000 people.

“This legal action marks a new phase in accountability for those that are complicit in alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. The evidence against BP demonstrates a clear failure to adhere to its own human rights policies and international law,” said Tayab Ali, director of the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians and international law head at Bindmans law firm, as The Guardian reported. Both organizations have been working with the claimants in the case.

“By facilitating the transport of oil that fuels military operations in Gaza, BP has contributed to the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the region. Our clients seek justice for the profound suffering and loss they have endured and call on BP to act responsibly by immediately halting its involvement,” Ali said.

The Palestinian claimants have suffered enormous losses because of the conflict. One of the lead claimants is a British citizen who has lost 16 family members from Israeli airstrikes, with surviving family members facing dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza.

The claimants are demanding an “immediate cessation of oil supply to Israel and facilitation through” the BP pipeline and an “admission liability and a commitment to mediation for assessing damages,” reported Common Dreams.

Other claimants have faced terrible physical and psychological harm, including displacement, amputations and loss of family members, with some dying because of lack of essential supplies and access to medical care, The Guardian reported.

The letter demands that BP immediately stop its facilitation and supply of oil to Israel through its pipeline, and that the company provide all relevant documents, including contracts, policies and risk assessments related to its operations in connection with oil supplies to Israel.

In addition to an admission of liability, the claimants seek BP’s commitment to mediation for the assessment of damages, as well as a public apology for all the harm it has caused.

The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations last week argued that “foreign governments have an obligation” under international law “to end the supply of fuel to Israel unless they can guarantee it will only be used for nonmilitary purposes,” reported Common Dreams.

“This includes both a ban on the export of crude oil, military jet fuel, and other fuels, as well as a prohibition on the transport of these commodities through their territory,” the Amsterdam-based nonprofit organization said.

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Scientists have estimated that bowhead whales — the longest-living whale species — can live more than 200 years.

It was once thought that the bowhead’s cousin, the right whale, had an average lifespan of about 70 to 80 years, but new research has revised that estimate to more than 130 years — nearly twice as long!

“From the standpoint of physiological scaling, these superannuated ages should not be unexpected. Whales are the largest living animals, and body size is highly correlated with longevity,” the authors of the study wrote.

The researchers worked with Indigenous subsistence hunters from Utqiaġvik, Alaska. They used chemical analysis of bowhead whales that had been killed to demonstrate that they are able to live more than two centuries, a press release from University of Alaska Fairbanks said.

The chemical evidence was corroborated by harpoon tips from the 19th century being recovered from bowheads killed during modern hunts.

Right whales are more closely related to bowheads than any other species and appear to have similar lifespans. Like their cousins, right whales filter their food through baleen plates and make seasonal migrations to birthing grounds.

The names given to right whales were sadly from whalers considering them to be the “right” whales for hunting because their thick blubber caused them to float after they had been killed.

“Industrial whaling, which for most species ended only 60 years ago, would have required any individuals now aged over 100 years to have survived at least 40 years of intense whaling, and any individual over 150 would have had to survive 90 years of that same intense hunt,” the authors wrote in the study. “Given that many whale species were reduced to less than 10% of their original population size, and the population minima for most species were reached in the mid-20th century, that degree of whaling would have rendered superannuated individuals extremely rare or completely absent from the age structures of most populations. Consequently, extremely old whales may not be part of the demographic makeup of current whale populations, even if they historically existed.”

The researchers looked at four decades of data that had been collected through photo identification programs tracking critically endangered North Atlantic right whales — who live along North America’s Atlantic coast — and Southern right whales, found south of the equator, the press release said.

The research team constructed survivorship curves — graphs showing how many of a population survives to each age — using the data, which are similar to those insurance companies use in the calculation of human life expectancies.

Their analysis showed that Southern right whales can live longer than 130 years — with some possibly living to 150 years — rather than the 70 to 80 years that had been previously thought.

In contrast, the team found that the average North Atlantic right whale lifespan is only 22 years, with few individuals living past 50.

Associate professor Greg Breed with University of Alaska Fairbanks explained that the stark contrast between the lifespans of bowhead and right whales is mostly due to human impacts.

“North Atlantic whales have unusually short lifespans compared to other whales, but this isn’t because of intrinsic differences in biology, and they should live much longer,” Breed, who is lead author of the study, said in the press release. “They’re frequently tangled in fishing gear or struck by ships, and they suffer from starvation, potentially linked to environmental changes we don’t fully understand.”

A North Atlantic right whale swims off with a small amount of fishing rope after a disentanglement effort. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, taken under NOAA research permit #15488

Breed has been studying marine mammals for years, including seals. Certain seal species have lifespans of up to 50 years. Narwhals can live a century or more.

Breed noted that there have been significant underestimations of whale lifespans in the past due to lack of whale aging data.

“We didn’t know how to age baleen whales until 1955, which was the very end of industrial whaling,” Breed explained. “By the time we figured it out, there weren’t many old whales left to study. So we just assumed they didn’t live that long.”

The new research could provide valuable information for future conservation efforts.

“To attain healthy populations that include old animals, recovery might take hundreds of years,” Breed said. “For animals that live to be 100 or 150 and only give birth to a surviving calf every 10 years or so, slow recovery is to be expected.”

The study highlights the essential nature of cultural knowledge in whale communities.

“There’s a growing recognition that recovery isn’t just about biomass or the number of individuals. It’s about the knowledge these animals pass along to the next generation,” Breed said. “That knowledge isn’t just genetic — it’s cultural and behavioral. Older individuals teach survival skills. Younger animals learn by observing and copying the strategies of the older ones.”

Breed and his colleagues plan to expand their research to additional whale populations and explore the possibility of other whale species currently believed to have lifespans of roughly 80 years living much longer. The researchers hope to discover more about whaling’s impact on the number of long-lived individuals in current populations and predict when they will recover to pre-whaling population numbers.

The study, “Extreme longevity may be the rule not the exception in Balaenid whales,” was published in the journal Science Advances.

The post Right Whales Can Live 130 Years or Longer, Research Finds appeared first on EcoWatch.

Researchers in northwest Peru’s Alto Mayo region have discovered 27 new animal species, including a semi-aquatic mouse, a salamander that climbs trees and a “blob-headed fish.”

The 38-day survey uncovered and recorded more than 2,000 species of plants and wildlife, reported The Guardian.

“Discovering even one new species of mammal on an expedition would be extraordinary, but discovering four new mammal species, as well as eight new fishes and three new amphibians, is mind-blowing,” said Trond Larsen, leader of the Rapid Assessment Program at Conservation International, as Euronews reported.

The expedition was led by a team of researchers from Conservation International who were joined by Indigenous scientists and guides from Global Earth, as well as local experts from the Indigenous Regional Federation of the Alto Mayo Awajun Communities.

“We know very little about the planet’s biodiversity, and these ecosystems hold so many mysteries,” said biologist Wily Palomino with Conservation International, who was part of the expedition, in a press release from Conservation International. “It would take 10 lifetimes to truly understand them. Expeditions like this are just the beginning.”

The Alto Mayo is a diverse and complex landscape of intertwined ecosystems and local communities that stretches from the Andes mountains to the Amazon.

The purpose of the expedition was to find the greatest number of species in a short time. The setting for this unique search was unusual, however, since the area has been scarred by deforestation and is full of human settlements, rather than being the kind of “pristine” forest setting where an abundance of rare wildlife would be found.

The researchers said the findings of the expedition demonstrate that people and nature can live side by side, but we must take immediate action to preserve it.

During the expedition, the team of 20 slogged through swamps, rivers and lagoons. They crossed farm fields and climbed mountains into cloud forests, all the while looking for movements and other signs of animals while setting up camera traps and collecting samples.

Of the 2,000 species they recorded, 27 were new to science and nearly 50 are threatened with extinction. Four of the newly discovered species were mammals.

“Mammals are the best-known animal group in the world — so discovering four new mammals in any expedition is surprising,” Larsen said in the press release. “Finding them in a region with significant human populations is extraordinary.”

The amphibious mouse the team discovered is part of the aguajales ecosystem — a swampy area dominated by aguaje palms. The area is a designated “ecosystem recovery zone,” where deforestation for rice farming is a threat to the mouse’s unique habitat.

Larsen said the species — which likely exclusively inhabits the Alto Mayo — is part of a semi-aquatic group of rodents, of which most known species are exceptionally rare.

Just before coming upon a dark brown harlequin frog — Atelopus seminiferus — an extremely rare species that had never been seen at such low elevations, “Larsen had crossed a muddy logging track, where a donkey pulled a cart of fresh-cut timber through the forest,” the press release said.

Palomino said many researchers hypothesize that fragmented forested areas hold little biodiversity, which is why they have largely ignored places like Alto Mayo. Palomino said the expedition challenges those views.

“The discovery of so many new and threatened species was so surprising, in part, because it was a nearly blank slate — no one has ever really looked,” Palomino said in the press release. “Now, we’re proving the unexpected: Small patches of healthy forests can support a wealth of species.”

Approximately 280,000 people live in Alto Mayo, including Indigenous Awajún people. To make ends meet during the end of the 1990s and early 2000s, community members were forced to allow migrant farmers to rent their lands.

This led to a steep rise in deforestation, according to Diego Dourojeanni, Conservation International’s leader of work with Alto Mayo’s Indigenous Peoples.

“Communities didn’t deforest their land because they wanted to — it was out of necessity,” Dourojeanni said in the press release. “While it helped in the short term, it became clear that this practice came at a steep cost to resources, food security and the ecosystem services like clean water that the forests provide.”

The expedition came out of efforts to address deforestation by working with the Awajún people and other local communities to help build alternative sources of livelihood, like selling vanilla and medicinal teas, in addition to practicing agroforestry with coffee beans and cocoa. They are also striving to improve Awajún community governance to ensure sustainable and equitable management of their territory.

The expedition was the beginning of a plan to connect Alto Mayo’s remaining patches of abundant biodiversity to create a conservation corridor for the long-term protection of the region’s wildlife.

“To effectively protect nature, you first need to know what’s there,” Dourojeanni explained. “By understanding where wildlife lives, we can make better land management decisions and target areas that are best suited for conservation and sustainable activities like ecotourism, selective logging and sustainable agriculture.”

Dourojeanni said getting a better idea of what lives in the forest is not just important for economic reasons.

“We want people to value forests and resources in a more emotional way,” Dourojeanni emphasized. “Because the truth is that if it’s just for income’s sake, it’s really, really hard to compete with agricultural drivers of deforestation. And traditional knowledge on how to use the forest is at risk of being lost in a generation or two.”

Dourojeanni said there have been signs of progress in the last decade. Communities have stopped renting out their land as much and have a better understanding of how important it is to protect their forests.

“It’s not too late yet,” Dourojeanni said. “If we do the right thing, people and nature can co-exist on this landscape.”

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