Patent applications can reveal emerging trends in wildlife trade, a new study has found.
From rhinoceros horns to pangolin scales, trade in wildlife is a highly lucrative business. In 2019, the legal global trade in wildlife was estimated to be worth about $107 billion. The illegal trade is thought to fetch between $7 billion and $23 billion annually.
As with any commercial business, those trading in wildlife also strategically adapt to shifting market trends in product preferences as well as trade policies, the study’s authors write. This includes filing patents to protect innovations or products that have strong commercial potential.
“These patent applications document changes in species, products and locations of wildlife trade,” study co-authors Amy Hinsley, a biologist at the University of Oxford, U.K., and Susanne Masters, a doctoral student at Leiden University, the Netherlands, write in The Conversation. “So patents can provide a window into innovations related to wild products.”
To test this hypothesis, the researchers analyzed 27,308 patents related to six highly traded groups of wildlife, including rhinos, pangolins, bears, sturgeons, horseshoe crabs and caterpillar fungus, popularly known as Himalayan Viagra. Many wildlife products made from these animals are incorrectly thought to have various medicinal properties.
The study’s analysis revealed there was a 130% annual increase in patent filings related to these target animal groups between 1988 and 2020, considerably more than the global average increase of 104% for all patents during the same period. This suggests there’s a growing commercial interest in wildlife-derived products, the researchers say.
Companies are also coming up with new applications for wildlife parts, including snuff and fertilizer containing rhino horn, and livestock feed containing pangolin scales, the study found.
Moreover, the analysis showed that stricter regulations and trade bans don’t necessarily lead to a decrease in wildlife-related patents. For instance, all 526 patents for rhino products were filed after the 1977 ban on the international trade ban in rhino horn. Nearly all of these were related to products containing actual rhino horn rather than new synthetic or farmed alternatives.
Furthermore, 426 of the rhino patents were filed in China after 1993, when the country banned trade in rhino horn and its medical derivatives. The patents include a potential treatment for blood disease in 2016 and an anti-cancer food supplement in 2013, the authors write in The Conversation. This trend of patent filings suggests that companies may expect trade bans to be relaxed in the future, the researchers say.
In fact, ongoing analysis of patent trends could serve as an early-warning system for emerging patterns in wildlife trade, the authors propose.
“Wildlife trade is subject to the same pressures and processes as other commercial sectors,” Hinsley and Summers write in The Conversation. “Patents reveal a side of wildlife trade that has not been recognised or incorporated into decision making.”
Banner image of white rhinoceros by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
British International Investment (BII), the U.K.’s development finance institution and impact investor, recently announced that it will invest up to $35 million in a controversial deepwater port project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This project, conservationists have previously warned, could damage Congo’s critical coastal habitats and sea turtle nesting areas.
The Banana port project, in a small town of the same name in Kongo Central province, is slated to be the DRC’s first port capable of handling the largest of goods-carrying container ships. The project is a collaboration between the DRC government and DP World, a Dubai-based logistics and port operations company, and is estimated to cost more than $1 billion. It has also been embroiled in several controversies.
In 2018, the “Banana Port Papers” from PPLAAF (Platform for the Protection of Whistleblowers in Africa) detailed serious allegations of corruption surrounding the initial negotiations between the then DRC government and DP World. These included lack of transparency, and negotiations that would enrich politicians like former president Joseph Kabila.
Conservationists and rangers have also voiced concerns about the project’s potential environmental impacts, including coastal erosion from the port’s construction and impacts on habitats of threatened species. The port is near Mangroves National Park, home to species like the African manatee (Trichechus senegalensis). The area also hosts critical nesting grounds for olive ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea).
“It’s terrible that British aid money is being ploughed into a scheme that ultimately will benefit a deeply problematic and very profitable corporation,” Nick Dearden, director of U.K.-based charity Global Justice Now, told Mongabay in an email. DP World and its subsidiary, P&O, have faced allegations of anti-worker practices.
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t surprise me,” Dearden added. “BII’s whole model confuses ‘development’ with big business making profits. Of course, the reality is really different — big business is often highly exploitative, extracting far more profit than the value they add to a country.”
A BII spokesperson told Mongabay that the institution had done its “due diligence on integrity matters, including the allegations levelled in the Banana Port Papers, which BII found to have numerous evidential gaps and flaws.”
They added that in 2017, DP World had conducted an environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA), in accordance with DRC legal requirements, that found “limited direct and indirect impact on flora and fauna.”
“Considering the length of time since this initial study was conducted, DP World has commenced a set of supplementary environmental and social studies with a leading global consultant,” the spokesperson said.
However, Dearden said BII’s investment models need a reassessment.
“DRC is a country which has been bled dry by Western countries and their corporations. Breaking that neo-colonial relationship is what is required, and I’m skeptical that will happen by pouring aid money into the projects of big business,” he said.
Banner image of olive ridley turtle by Brad Flickinger via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Timber and pulp industries are lagging in transparency regarding their zero-deforestation and traceability commitments, a new report shows.
The report, produced by the conservation nonprofit Zoological Society of London (ZSL), indicates that most of the top 100 companies in these sectors fail to disclose essential environmental, social and governance (ESG) data, which puts them out of step with international targets and upcoming European Union regulations aimed at curbing deforestation.
The ZSL report found that timber and pulp companies scored an average of just 24% on their commitments to and reporting of sustainable and ethical practices, a significant drop from 37% in 2017, when assessments first began. The decline underscores a lack of public engagement with critical ESG issues, including deforestation, biodiversity loss and the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs), the ZSL press release notes. While about half of the surveyed companies have made commitments to zero deforestation, just over 14% actually monitor deforestation within their operations.
Mongabay reached out to the International Tropical Timber Association, based in Japan, but the organization declined to comment, saying they had not yet had a chance to review the report.
Deforestation and forest degradation are responsible for roughly 15-20% of global carbon emissions. In contrast, intact forests absorb roughly one-third of the carbon dioxide released by fossil fuels annually, making forest protection a critical element in the global fight against climate change.
At the 26th U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties, also known as COP26, held in Glasgow in 2021, 145 countries agreed to a goal of zero deforestation by 2030. Two years later, in June 2023, the European Union introduced a law to prevent imports of seven forest-related commodities most associated with deforestation. The European Union Deforestation Regulation, (EUDR) requires that companies selling their goods in the EU must provide evidence that their products didn’t come from land deforested since 2020.
Despite these measures, the ZSL report found that only one out of 88 timber companies published georeferenced maps of all the forests they source from, making it challenging to verify that their products are not contributing to deforestation. Although the EUDR does not mandate public disclosure of such information, increased transparency would enhance accountability and complement the EUDR, Sam Ross, ZSL’s sustainable business project analyst who led the assessment, says in the press release.
“This void of information can make it incredibly difficult to identify links between companies, and increases the risk of companies sourcing from bad actors in the supply chain without being held accountable,” Ross says.
Transparency is unlikely to come from the pulp and timber sectors alone, Ross adds. “It’s clear that companies aren’t going to vastly increase their public disclosures on their own accord. When there’s a clear pressure from an investor, there is a much clearer and more direct incentive for companies to actually improve their reporting,” he tells Mongabay in a phone call.
Banner image: courtesy of David Johnston, ZSL
For the first time ever, scientists have had help from sea lions in mapping the ocean floor. And the marine mammals have done their job well, capturing six different marine habitats, including algal meadows and reefs, that make up South Australia’s seabed, researchers report in a recently published study.
For much of the planet’s ocean, what the seafloor looks like is still a mystery. Conventional surveys using specialized underwater equipment and vessels require large crews as well as good weather, which makes mapping wide areas challenging and expensive, Nathan Angelakis, lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the University of Adelaide, Australia, told Mongabay in an email.
As an alternative, the researchers fit small, lightweight video cameras and movement trackers on eight adult female Australian sea lions (Neophoca cinerea). The team had two goals: to understand the habitats and food that are critical for the endangered species, and to map the little-known seafloor off southern Australia’s coast.
The sea lion videographers ended up capturing more than 89 hours of data and footage, recording around 560 kilometers (350 miles) of the continental shelf, at depths of 5-110 meters (16-360 feet). On reviewing this data, the scientists saw that the sea lions eat a wide variety of fish, small sharks, stingrays and octopuses, either by flipping rocks over, digging up sand, or ambushing schools of fish. “We were also lucky enough to capture footage of a mother taking her pup on a trip to sea, providing the first direct evidence we have that Australian sea lion mothers pass on their foraging skills to pups,” Angelakis said.
The team also identified six kinds of seabed habitats from the videos. They combined this habitat data at different locations, with long-term oceanographic and environmental data for those locations, to then predict habitats for areas that the sea lions didn’t visit. “This allowed us to map and predict habitats on the seabed for more than 5,000 square km [1,930 square miles] of previously unexplored seabed across the continental shelf in southern Australia,” Angelakis said.
Sea lion swimming through invertebrate reef, sponge garden, macroalgae reef, bare sand, and invertebrate boulder habitats. Video: Angelakis et al. 2024.
Katie Dunkley, a marine researcher at the University of Cambridge, U.K., who wasn’t involved in the study, told The Washington Post that while the number of sea lions used in the study was small, the study was a “proof of concept” showing that sea lions can help us map the ocean floor.
Angelakis added that such baseline knowledge of seabed habitats and the conditions that influence their distribution is crucial “for understanding how they may be impacted by human activity.” Furthermore, the study improves our understanding of the marine habitats that are crucial for the rapidly declining Australian sea lions, he said.
“This information is fundamental for better conserving and managing their populations in the future,” Angelakis added.
Banner image of Australian sea lion by John Turnbull via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Two African lion brothers recently broke the record for the longest documented swim across a body of water. The swim was made more impressive by the fact that the water was teeming with crocodiles and one of the lions has only three legs.
The pair of African lions (Panthera leo), locally known as Jacob and Tibu, swam roughly 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) across Uganda’s Kazinga channel in Queen Elizabeth National Park in February. Researchers documented the historic swim with a thermal camera attached to a drone. Before this, lions have been documented swimming just 10-100 meters (32-328 feet).
Jacob, the three-legged 10-year-old lion, is somewhat famous in the region. Researchers have been documenting the challenges of his life for years.
“I’d bet all my belongings that we are looking at Africa’s most resilient lion: he has been gored by a buffalo, his family was poisoned for lion body part trade, he was caught in a poacher’s snare and finally lost his leg in another attempted poaching incident where he was caught in a steel trap,” Alexander Braczkowski, a conservation biologist at Australia’s Griffith University and lead researcher on the study, says in a statement.
The Kazinga channel is well-known locally for having a high density of crocodiles, the study’s authors write. On land, lions are known to hunt crocs occasionally, but in water lions are at a huge disadvantage. Yet, the researchers observed the brothers swimming across the channel six times.
Their biggest motivation, the researchers say, was likely a lack of lionesses locally. The brothers live in Kazinga village region. But the highest density of lionesses is on the other side of the channel in the Mweya-Kasenyi region. Once there, though, the brothers also encountered Mweya-Kasenyi’s male lions. The researchers observed two occasions in which Jacob and Tibu fought with the resident male lions over territory, forcing the brothers to swim back across the croc-filled channel.
There is a bridge across the channel, the authors write, but it is guarded by two armed guards. The researchers suggest the lion brothers took the risky croc-filled swim to avoid human contact.
African lions have vanished from more than 90% of their historic range, largely due to habitat loss and fragmentation. The species is locally extinct in 26 African countries and is currently listed as vulnerable on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. In Uganda, lions are found mainly in the three largest savanna parks.
Reduction in habitat forces lions to take risks, the researchers say, like crossing dangerous water bodies, to find food and mates. One upside of this finding, the researchers write, is that it changes the understanding of what should be considered a barrier between lion populations. “We urge future research to explore these long-distance swimming behaviors and functional habitat connectivity of big cats in human-dominated landscapes,” they conclude.
Banner image: Jacob and Tibu courtesy of Griffith University
South Africa’s new environment minister is calling for an out-of-court settlement with conservation groups that earlier this year filed a case against his predecessor for not doing enough to protect plummeting populations of African penguins.
Dion George, who took office in July, made the announcement on Aug. 20 via his Democratic Alliance party, adding he wants to “secure the Penguin’s fish diet for years to come.”
“Continuing a court battle while penguins starve and their numbers decline would be counterproductive,” Andrew de Blocq Sheltinga, a DA spokesperson, said in a statement. “The actions by the Minister will support the recovery of this highly endangered and iconic species, which is endemic to Southern Africa.”
The lawsuit, filed in March by BirdLife South Africa and the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, centers on then-environment minister Barbara Creecy’s decision to implement fishing closures around penguin breeding colonies. The conservation groups say the closures are “biologically meaningless” in terms of safeguarding the bird’s food supply.
The African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) has seen perilous population declines, from more than 1 million breeding pairs a century ago, to fewer than 15,000 breeding pairs in South Africa and Namibia. Recent declines are largely because of food shortage, especially sardines and anchovies, due to both competition with commercial fisheries and climate warming. Scientists say the penguin could become extinct by 2035 if the current trend continues. To secure the bird’s food stocks, fishing closures around its breeding colonies have been proposed as a solution.
However, negotiations between conservation groups and the fishing industry on the closure boundaries have repeatedly broken down. So in December 2022, Creecy appointed an independent panel of international experts to suggest boundaries that would benefit penguins while minimizing costs to the fishing industry. Despite the panel’s recommendations, Creecy announced in August 2023 that the government would extend existing interim closures until 2033.
“These so-called interim closures had been imposed while the panel was busy doing its analysis, and they’re not biologically meaningful at all,” Kate Handley, executive director of Cape Town-based nonprofit Biodiversity Law Centre, representing the conservation groups in their lawsuit, told Mongabay by phone.
Alistair McInnes, seabird conservationist at BirdLife South Africa, said the current closures “do not adequately reflect the most preferable foraging areas for African Penguins during the breeding season and in 4 of the 6 closures are less than or equal to only half their preferred foraging areas.”
The lawsuit names South Africa’s environment minister (Creecy at the time; George at present) as the first respondent and two fishing associations as additional respondents. It’s set to be heard in October.
Handley said George’s call to settle the case is encouraging. However, it’s still unclear how he proposes to correct the existing closures. “We have not yet received a favorable settlement proposal, and the litigation is, at this moment, ongoing,” Handley said.
Banner image of African penguins by Olga Ernst via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The rivers of the Amazon Basin serve as highways for much of the region. Boats are often the easiest and quickest way to get goods and services in and out of remote communities and large cities alike. However, the Amazon Basin has experienced several severe droughts over the last 20 years, which have caused river levels to drop so low they couldn’t be used to navigate through the region.
In the Brazilian Amazon, this puts Indigenous and local communities at risk of isolation, restricting their access to essential services, a recently published study has found.
To arrive at these findings, researchers looked at 3,671 non-Indigenous Brazilian localities, from large cities and state capitals to small towns, as well as 2,521 Indigenous villages.
They assessed each community’s risk of isolation by comparing their distance from the closest navigable water body and road. They found that roughly 60% of non-Indigenous communities are closer to a water body than a road, while 66% of the Indigenous communities were more reliant on waterways in the high-water season. This reliance on rivers means that a significant portion of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities face the risk of becoming isolated during extreme droughts.
The researchers also analyzed 142 digital news statements reporting on the impact of droughts between 2000 and 2020 and found that transportation, food supply and water supply were the most frequently cited concerns.
During severe droughts, such as those that occurred in 2005, 2010, 2015-16, and 2023, river navigation becomes challenging or even impossible, the authors wrote, rendering people unable to access basic medical care, education services and food. Furthermore, locals can no longer trade the foods they produce, including nuts, cassava, fruits and fish, leading to poverty. Extreme drought can also create food insecurity as rivers dry up and fish become inaccessible.
Moreover, drought conditions are linked to a rise in waterborne diseases and respiratory illnesses due to deteriorating water quality and increased wildfires. Reduced river levels can also hinder environmental law enforcement in remote areas, the authors write. Additionally, wildlife including turtles and manatees become more vulnerable to poaching as their habitats shrink.
Climate projections suggest the Amazon will be drier and experience more droughts in the future. “This might be the ‘new normal’ for the Amazon,” Letícia Santos de Lima, lead author of the study and an environmental hydrogeology researcher with the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, wrote in Springer Nature.
Lima added that her team is concerned that pro-road officials might see their research as an affirmation that constructing more roads is the solution to helping isolated communities. In fact, roads frequently lead to more deforestation and changes in rainfall that exacerbate drought conditions, she wrote. Instead, the researchers advocated for including local knowledge in “identifying potential solutions and opportunities for adaptation,” they wrote in the study.
A U.S. District Court in Maryland recently ruled in favor of a coalition of environmental groups, finding that a federal assessment of oil and gas activities’ impact on the critically endangered Rice’s whale was flawed.
Rice’s whales (Balaenoptera ricei) were identified as a new species in 2021 after a dead whale with plastic in its gut, washed ashore in Florida, allowing scientists to study it closely. With fewer than 100 individuals estimated to remain, these 17-meter (55-feet) long whales are among the most endangered species of large whales in the world. Rice’s whales are endemic to the Gulf of Mexico and found nowhere else on earth. At the same time, the Gulf is a hotbed for offshore oil production, with roughly 15% of all U.S. crude oil coming from the region.
In 2020, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) issued an assessment, or a biological opinion, that was supposed to ensure oil drilling could be done in a way that would not harm the whales. However, the recent decision from the district court in Maryland found that the opinion did not sufficiently address multiple concerns: it violated the Endangered Species Act and “underestimated the risk and harms of oil spills to protected species.” The court said NMFS incorrectly assumed the population of Rice’s whale remained the same after the catastrophic Deep Water Horizon spill, despite their own evidence to the contrary. Scientists estimate roughly 20% of the population was lost during that 2010 spill.
The court also said the biological opinion didn’t adequately address all the stressors from oil and gas development, such as the number of ship strikes that were likely as a result.
“Simply put, this biological opinion would have condemned the Gulf of Mexico Rice’s whales to extinction,” said Joanie Steinhaus, ocean director for the California-headquartered nonprofit Turtle Island Restoration Network, one of the plaintiffs in the case, in a statement.
The court vacated NMFS’s opinion as of December, 2024, meaning operations can continue on as they have been until then. That gives the agency roughly four months to write a new biological opinion that will provide the protections legally required.
The National Ocean Industries Association, an industry advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., issued a statement in which they urged NMFS to quickly issue a new biological opinion.
“We are deeply disappointed in the order. The disruptive consequences to the Gulf of Mexico states and U.S. economy cannot be understated if the federal agencies fail to timely issue a new biological opinion.”
Chris Eaton, a senior attorney with Earth Justice, said in a statement that NMFS now has the opportunity to “fix the biological opinion’s flaws and provide the Rice’s whale and other species the protections they need to survive and thrive. If the service does its job right, the end result will be better for Gulf communities and species,” he said.
Banner image: courtesy of NOAA Fisheries
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