A new study reports that the Bird’s Head Seascape off Indonesia’s West Papua serves as a vital habitat for juvenile male whale sharks, but lift-net fisheries, tourism boats and emerging mining activities in the region underscore the urgent need for stronger protection and management. The population demographics of the whale shark (Rhincodon typus) within the four key BHS regions (Cendrawasih Bay, Kaimana, Raja Ampat, and Fakfak) showed a dominance of juvenile males that use these habitats as nursery or foraging grounds and reducing predation risk while growing, according to the research published Aug. 28 in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. The international group of researchers also found that more than half of the whale sharks in the study had injuries from preventable human causes. “The scars and wounds we see on whale sharks are like a diary of their encounters with people,” Edy Setyawan, lead conservation scientist at the Elasmobranch Institute Indonesia who is the lead author of the paper, told Mongabay in an email. The Bird’s Head Seascape is a vital nursery for juvenile male whale sharks. Image courtesy of Edy Setyawan. Most whale shark sightings occurred in Cenderawasih Bay and Kaimana. Image courtesy of Edy Setyawan. From 2010-23, the researchers tracked 268 whale sharks across the BHS — a region hosting a network of 26 marine protected areas and a hotspot for marine megafauna and tropical marine biodiversity — using photos from scientists and citizen divers. Nearly all sightings were in Cenderawasih Bay and Kaimana, where the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

In the steaming lowlands of Veracruz and the Yucatán, where strangler figs knot the canopy and howler monkeys bellow at dawn, a man with a field notebook kept noticing what others overlooked. Arturo Gómez-Pompa believed tropical forests were not untouched wilderness but “landscapes of memory,” shaped for millennia by Indigenous hands. Long before “biodiversity” became a rallying cry, he documented how local communities enriched and tended the jungle, and argued that conservation should do the same. Few scientists did more to upend the idea of the rainforest as a pristine museum and recast it as a living archive of stewardship. He had not meant to be a botanist. Born in Mexico City in 1934, he dutifully enrolled in medicine, his parents’ wish, until a teenage visit to a cousin’s ranch in Tamaulipas altered his course. Coyotes, rattlesnakes and hawks proved more compelling than anatomy texts. He switched to biology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he completed his doctorate in 1966. By then he was already a familiar figure in the selvas, cataloguing barbasco yams for a state pharmaceutical firm and learning from local guides whose names he later insisted on including in his papers. From those muddy trails grew a career devoted to bridging science and society. In 1975 he founded Mexico’s National Institute for Research on Biotic Resources (INIREB) in Xalapa, one of the first efforts to decentralize biological research from the capital. There he helped establish agroecology as a discipline, showing that traditional farming…This article was originally published on Mongabay

After 11 years, the Alto Tamaya Saweto community has finally received confirmation of convictions in the 2014 murders of Indigenous Ashéninka leaders Edwin Chota, Jorge Ríos, Leoncio Quintanísima and Francisco Pinedo. The killings occurred along the Peru-Brazil border, where the leaders had been actively campaigning against illegal logging in their territory since 2008. On Aug. 25, the appeals chamber of the Superior Court of Ucayali, the department where the killings occurred, ratified the ruling of the first trial, which sentenced timber contractors José Estrada and Hugo Soria, as well as two timber workers, brothers Josimar and Segundo Atachi, to 28 years and three months of prison. “This is a historic ruling for Peru because it’s the first time the judiciary has recognized the work of Indigenous peoples in the defense of human rights and their relationship with nature,” Maritza Quispe, a constitutional lawyer of the Legal Defense Institute (IDL), told Mongabay Latam. Edwin Chota had led the committee of Ashéninka leaders who were going to Brazil to organize the defense of the Saweto forest. He was killed during the journey. Image courtesy of Anouk García. The loggers did not attend the sentencing hearing, which lasted approximately eight hours; therefore, the judiciary issued an immediate arrest warrant. “We ask the police to arrest those sentenced. If they are not in prison, there is no justice,” said Ergilia Rengifo, Ríos’ widow, after learning of the decision of the bench composed of senior judges Robin Barreda, Jonatan Basagoitia, and Marco Santa Cruz. A…This article was originally published on Mongabay