Saving Living Jewels: One Woman’s Mission to Shine a Light on the Ornamental Fish Trade

Marine biologist Monica Biondo has spent more than a decade studying the multibillion-dollar market for these colorful fish, which pulls thousands of species from the ocean each year.

Nothing fascinates Monica Biondo more than the animals often referred to as the ocean’s “living jewels” — the vividly colored little fishes who dance around in its waters.

Biondo, a Swiss marine biologist, became enamored with ocean life as a child after spending many summers snorkeling along the Italian coastline. Nowadays you’re more likely to find her deep-diving into trade records than marine waters. As the head of research and conservation at Fondation Franz Weber, she has spent the past decade searching through data on the marine ornamental fish trade.

These are the colorful fish you see in home aquariums or for sale at pet stores; Biondo wants to know where they came from, how they got there, and what happened to them along the way.

Compared to the clear waters around the coral reefs she’s explored, the records on these fish are frustratingly murky. Wading through them has though provided her with clarity on her calling: shining a light on the aquarium trade’s vast exploitation of these glamorous ocean dwellers.

Searching in the Dark

Her entry into the fray came in the form of a Banggai cardinalfish, a striking little fish endemic to an archipelago in Indonesia that first became known to science in the 1930s. A scientist redescribed the species in 1994, kickstarting a tragic surge in the fish’s popularity for aquariums. Within less than a decade, 90% of the population had disappeared, Biondo says.

A Banggai cardinalfish swims in Indonesia’s tropical waters. Photo: Jens Petersen (CC BY-SA 3.0)

After witnessing that rapid decline, along with the failure of countries to subsequently regulate global trade in the species, Biondo was hooked. “That really pushed me into looking into this trade,” she says.

In her search for information she has pored over paperwork in the Swiss Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office’s records warehouse. She and her colleagues at Pro Coral Fish have also spent years rifling through a European Union-wide electronic database called the Trade Control and Expert System (TRACES), which collects information on animal imports.

Although the datasets varied, the questions have remained the same. How many marine ornamental fish are being imported? What species are they? Where did they originate?

These straightforward questions are hard to answer to because the trade — despite being worth billions annually — has no mandatory data-collection requirements. As a result, information gathered about trade in these fishes tends to be opaque and haphazard compared to information on live organisms like farmed food animals.

Biondo reckons this is because the fishes are perceived as “just ornamentals.” Everyone is used to seeing them in aquariums, so few people recognize they may be in trouble in the wild.

Illuminating Findings

In a 2022 report for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the UN Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre criticized the data on ornamental fish collected and reported by the major exporting regions and some importing countries. Revealingly, WCMC was unable to even estimate the number of marine fishes traded globally each year with the data at its disposal.

CITES is the global wildlife trade treaty body that regulates and monitors international trade in over 40,000 threatened animal and plant species.

In this landscape Biondo’s scrutiny of European imports offers key insights into the trade. She’s revealing where gaps exist in the data collection that does occur and, crucially, how they can be plugged.

For one thing, the origin of marine ornamental fishes in trade is often unclear. Biondo highlights an example: TRACES data points to Singapore as a key exporter to the European Union, but she says the country is a hub for exports rather than a source, meaning many of the fishes were originally caught elsewhere.

Biondo has also found that EU records often fail to identify the species in trade. Her latest research paper highlighted that the bloc imported around 26 million marine fishes from more than 60 countries between 2014 and 2021. But only two-thirds of the fishes — 17.5 million — were identified to species level.

Conservation biologist Alice Hughes says records can be even less specific in other places, with many datasets listing marine fishes simply as “tropical fish.” The Law Enforcement Management Information System, the U.S. wildlife trade database, is a case in point. Data collected in LEMIS and submitted to CITES shows the United States imports 5-9 million marine ornamental fishes annually, but most of that trade is reported generically as “tropical fish.”

The United States has long been the largest importer of ornamental fishes, both marine and freshwater, although Biondo’s research shows that the EU now leads in terms of import value for marine fishes. Overall, she says, existing evidence indicates the global aquarium trade involves at least 3,000 marine fish species — but the actual number is potentially even higher.

All 4,000 known coral reef fishes could be in trade, Biondo says. Without better data, it’s impossible to know for sure.

Strengthening Systems

To improve the situation, Biondo and others have called on the EU and United States to modify TRACES and LEMIS, respectively.

Biondo says both systems should be tweaked to ensure traders always provide species information. She also says they should collect data on whether fishes are sourced from farms or the wild, along with the place of capture of wild-sourced fishes.

While freshwater species are often farmed, relatively few marine fishes have been successfully bred in captivity in commercial numbers. This means that marine species are overwhelmingly wild caught, taken mainly from coral reefs.

These adaptations to the EU and U.S. systems would improve the data landscape dramatically. In turn, better data would help to ensure that the trade is sustainably managed. Hughes says that in the absence of robust information, sustainable management is presently “entirely dependent on good will of suppliers, and often a degree of guess work given the lack of population data for many species.”

Safeguarding Fishes and Ecosystems

Considering that most marine fishes are taken from the wild, sustainable management is necessary to ensure that trade does not threaten species’ survival. This is particularly true at this juncture as coral reefs currently face a litany of threats, including marine heatwaves, ocean acidification, storm damage, pollution, and diseases. Biondo argues that “all coral fishes are endangered because their habitat is endangered.” That means it’s vital to ensure coral fish populations are not put at risk by additional pressures, such as trade.

Safeguarding fishes is crucial for coral ecosystems, too, because these environments originally flourished due to the interrelations and reciprocities between organisms that live in them. This is why marine fishes don’t breed well in captivity, says Biondo, as only natural coral ecosystems can offer what they need to thrive — and vice versa.

For instance, bluestreak cleaner wrasses are among the species who remove parasites from other fishes. Studies show that the cleaner wrasse’s services can benefit recipient fishes’ growth and size, as well as the abundance and diversity of fishes on reefs. Their services even improve the cognitive function of damselfishes who, in turn, consume algae on reefs, alongside parrotfishes and surgeonfishes. These fishes ensure that algae, which is also vital to reef ecosystems, does not become so abundant that it suffocates corals.

A bluestreak cleaner wrasse provides cleaning services for a parrotfish. Photo: Dmitry Domrin (CC BY 4.0)

All these types of fishes are exploited in the aquarium trade to greater or lesser extents. But without adequate data and monitoring, whether their exploitation poses a threat to crisis-stricken reefs is anyone’s guess.

Running Against the Clock

If robust information existed, species potentially at risk could be identified and considered for inclusion in CITES, ideally before they became endangered. The trade in aquarium fishes has largely flown under the treaty body’s radar to date, with few ornamental fishes listed in CITES. The treaty body regulates international trade in seahorses, some sharks and rays that are exploited for larger aquaria, the clarion angelfish, and the humphead wrasse. But the thousands of small, colorful reef species found in aquariums are not covered.

However, thanks to Biondo’s doggedness, CITES has begun to review the marine ornamental fish trade in recent years.

In May the treaty body held a four-day workshop on the issue. Among other things, attendees discussed strategies for identifying potentially at-risk species.

Unsurprisingly, Biondo has some ideas on this. In her research, she has created “watchlists” that she says could be used to pinpoint species traded within the EU that would benefit from CITES listings. The watchlists, which were published in her latest paper this June in the journal Animals, spotlight species that warrant close monitoring due to various factors, such as trade levels and trends, vulnerability to fishing, and conservation status.

Biondo’s research — including her watchlists — fed into the outcomes of the May meeting, as did the work of other researchers and relevant parties. These outcomes, which included the creation of a “catalogue” of species in trade and various vulnerability analyses for some of those species, are now being considered by CITES’ Animals Committee.

Some common marine aquarium fishes feature in the watchlists. Indeed, the blue-green damselfish sits at the top of one of them — perhaps the most heavily traded marine ornamental fish of all. The fish’s watchlist position is due high levels of trade and an inexplicable 70% drop in imports to the EU between 2014 and 2021, which could indicate population declines.

Bluegreen damselfish shelter in the safety that corals provide. Photo: Paul Asman and Jill Lenoble (CC BY 2.0)

The United Kingdom’s Ornamental Aquatic Trade Association says this “abundant” fish is safeguarded from overexploitation because extraction is spread out over “dozens of collection points.” Many millions of blue green damselfish have been taken from the ocean over the years, yet the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List only assessed the species’ conservation status in 2021. The IUCN categorized the fish as Least Concern but stressed that “quantified data” on populations is limited across most of its range. Overall, the IUCN found the species to be declining globally and strongly recommended monitoring of populations and trade, alongside improved regulation of exploitation.

Nonetheless, Biondo says fishes like the blue-green damselfish illustrate a persistent mentality that because the fish are abundant, they can’t be fished out.

She doesn’t agree.

“We’re running against the clock,” she warns, to safeguard coral reefs and the living jewels that call them home.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Wildlife Trafficking: 10 Things Everyone Needs to Know

Advice for U.S. Government Scientists: Lessons Learned From the ‘Muzzling’ of Their Canadian Counterparts

The next four years — and beyond — are going to be awful for the science and conservation community. By learning from past experiences, we can try to minimize the damage.

There’s no sugarcoating it: The 2024 election was terrible news for science, the environment, and the role of expertise and evidence in public policymaking. A lot of important things we care about and have worked hard to create and protect are going to be broken, some beyond repair. Destructive things we worked hard to prevent are going to happen — including some that we won’t be able to undo.

While nothing exactly like the second Trump administration has happened before, some elements of what we’re likely to see mirror the era of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. And several scientists affected by Harper’s repressive policies tell me that by working together and planning strategically, we will be able to stop some of this.

During Harper’s time in office, from 2006-2015, Canadian government scientists were prevented from sharing their expertise in government policymaking. The government also banned them from speaking to journalists or the public, often referred to as “muzzling.” The Harper administration destroyed libraries and stopped some new hiring of experts in key areas.

The intent was simple: The administration had ideological policy goals, and they weren’t interested in letting facts, evidence or reality get in the way of achieving them.

The second Trump administration will almost certainly do this — and worse. They already took a stab at it the first time, when government experts who warned the public about harmful policy choices faced serious professional retaliation and taxpayer-funded sources of key information were suppressed, hidden, or even deleted.

What can we do about it?

I spoke with several colleagues who experienced working under the Harper administration, as well as several experts in the role of evidence-based public policymaking. They offered some clear advice.

Step One: They Can’t Delete What They Don’t Exclusively Control

For scientists working at government agencies, they suggest making copies of everything so it can be stored somewhere else — and to do that as soon as possible, certainly well before the next administration starts.

For example, does your agency have a publicly funded database, report, or educational website that has anything to do with climate change, conservation, diversity, equity and inclusion, or public health? It’s very likely that the next administration will try to suppress or delete at least some of it. A nongovernment partner, such as a university or large nonprofit, can host copies of these important documents and data if they’re shared in advance.

These efforts are already underway, but it’s vital to spread the advice as far as possible, as quickly as possible, so no data is left vulnerable.

Step Two: Prepare to Speak Out (or Blow the Whistle)

Once the new administration takes place, one of the first things they’re likely to do will be to institute their own muzzling policy.

With this in mind, several colleagues pointed out the importance of getting information about what’s happening to the public. Investigative journalism sites like ProPublica are already actively seeking sources from government agency employees and have provided detailed information on how to safely and anonymously  communicate with them. Research those options now, so you have the tools in your back pocket.

While it may become impossible to share key information through normal official channels, some of the experts I spoke with suggested that anonymous or pseudonymous social media accounts and blogs can be used to share expertise and key updates through unofficial channels. During the first Trump administration, some brave government employees set up unofficial “alt” or “rogue” social media accounts, anonymously sharing what experts in those agencies really thought. Perhaps the most famous of these was the “Alt National Park Service,” which arose after the Trump administration limited the National Park Service’s ability to communicate with the public.

Step Three: Collaborate (Sometimes Quietly)

There’s another way to make sure important work still happens and gets communicated, several colleagues told me: Government scientists can work as part of teams that include external scientists.

Working with collaborators on research projects means that even if you aren’t allowed to comment on a result or project, someone else can share it. If the Trump administration tries to stop it from getting released, consider removing yourself as a named author and letting the project go forward without you, perhaps with you listed in the acknowledgments instead of as a coauthor.

Step Four: Reveal How the Sauce Is Made

Several experts pointed out that agency-level regulatory decisions and reports, and changes to internal policies about how to communicate them with the public, rarely make headlines. This means that far too much of this will happen in the shadows.

At the same time, we all have a duty to make sure that everyone knows that — despite some occasional bureaucratic annoyances — we are safer, healthier, and more prosperous when key decisions are made by people who know what they’re talking about evaluating the best available evidence, rather than by uninformed idealogues. This can take many forms but requires active communication with the public and with journalists about why science, evidence, and expertise matter.

Step Five: Embrace Bureaucracy

And what if you see potential harm coming down the pike? Some experts advise using all the resources at your disposal to slow their implementation. Large bureaucracies like government agencies have their advantages in this regard.

For example, right now right-wing groups are bombarding government agencies with Freedom of Information Act requests, trying to weed out people who have advocated for diversity programs or had negative things to say about Trump. Others are looking for programs that mention climate change or other environmental threats — programs they want to dismantle. This will likely continue once the new administration is in office. Delaying responses, providing incomplete answers, and similar tactics can very well shield some people and things that we care about from prying eyes.

via GIPHY

One advantage we have is that Trump administration attorneys and officials looking for this information (or people to punish) aren’t likely to be the best in their fields. As attorney Ken White put it, “Clown shoes are better than jackboots.”

Step Six: As Painful As This Is, We Can Get Through It

While the “muzzling” of scientific expertise under the Harper administration has effects that are still being felt a decade later, it did not and will not last forever.

Neither will this.

Assuming we still have free and fair elections in this country, there are midterms in 2026, during which Democrats have a shot at reclaiming one or both houses of Congress. We don’t have to hold off this assault on science and the environment forever. Ideally we just have to slow some of it for two or four years.

Meanwhile, external groups will almost certainly bring many lawsuits against the Trump administration. We can save a lot of important things we care about by being strategic and collaborative, keeping an eye on the light at the end of the tunnel.

Everyone I spoke with stressed that standing up to an autocratic government carries some professional, and even personal, risk — and you may not be in a position to do it. You’re not a bad person for protecting yourself and your family.

But a few brave and anonymous civil servants may be our last, best line of defense.

Further Reading:

“The War on Science: Can the U.S. Learn from Canada” by Sarah Boon (2017)

“Ending the Donald Trump War on Science: What you need to know about policies on science, the environment and the coronavirus” by John Dupuis (2020)

“A survivor’s guide to being a muzzled scientist” by Michael Rennie (2017)

“The guide to fighting back against Trump 2.0” by Leah Greenberg Ezra Levin (2024)

“On Organizing” by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (2024)

“Guidance on Speaking Truth to Power” by Alexandra Morton (2024)

“Resources for Federal Scientists” by the Union of Concerned Scientists (2024)

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

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Previously in The Revelator:

Inhumanity at the Border — and Beyond

This Month in Conservation Science: Trojan Seahorses and ‘Vampire’ Birds

Journals this month looked at “fabulous but forgotten” ecosystems, hungry monkeys, roaming lions, lead-poisoned birds, and more — including a focus on microplastics.

When I worked for a major academic publisher in the early 2000s, Christmas came twice a year: once in December and once when the annual Journal Citation Reports came out.

The JCR, published every year since 1975, ranks academic journals against each other. Each journal receives something called an “impact factor,” a calculation based on how many papers a journal publishes and how many times its papers are cited by subsequent research within two years.

This is a very big deal in scientific circles. The higher the impact factor, the more readily the publisher can sell a journal to libraries and other institutions and the more likely the journal is to receive high-quality submissions. That, in turn, helps keep future impact factors high.

It’s not a perfect system. Smaller journals — such as those from the Global South or those covering narrow topics — don’t get cited as often, so they may not receive a high impact factor.

That doesn’t mean they don’t have an impact, though: Recent research found that these smaller, niche journals actually have a greater effect on policy — particularly when it comes to protecting endangered species.

Meanwhile there are plenty of other ways to assess a journal’s impact. Media mentions are also a big deal, and many journals now publish statistics for each paper’s news links or social-media shares. It could be argued that nonscientific citations have a greater effect on policy and public perception than anything else.

So let’s dive into those smaller journals and share the latest science from other conservation journals around the world. Below you’ll find more than three dozen papers that grabbed my attention in the past few weeks. They cover “vampire” birds, hungry monkeys, feral cats, roaming lions, the wildlife trade, and more. Most of the articles are open access, so they should be available to researchers (and any other interested readers) around the globe.

Will they also shape policy? That remains to be seen, but some of these papers have only been downloaded a couple of hundred times as of this writing, so let’s give them a fighting chance.

    • “Animal-borne sensors reveal high human impact on soundscapes near a critical sea turtle nesting beach” (Biological Conservation)
    • “Are vehicle strikes causing millions of bee deaths per day on western United States roads? Preliminary data suggests the number is high” (Sustainable Environment)
    • “Camouflage or Coincidence? Investigating the Effects of Spatial and Temporal Environmental Features on Feral Cat Morphology in Tasmania” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “Climatic drought and trophic disruption in an endemic subalpine Hawaiian forest bird” (Biological Conservation)
    • “Conserving genetic diversity hotspots under climate change: Are protected areas helpful?” (Biological Conservation)
    • “Counterillumination reduces bites by Great White sharks” (Current Biology)
    • “Diurnal Activity Budgets and Feeding Habits of Grivet Monkey (Chlorocebus aethiops aethiops) in Fragmented Moist Afromontane Forest” (African Journal of Ecology)
    • “Environmental Conservation and the Bulawayo CBD as a Linguistic Landscape Construction: An Ecolinguistics Perspective” (Journal of Asian and African Studies)
    • “Fabulous but Forgotten Fucoid Forests” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “Facing the heat: nestlings of a cavity-nesting raptor trade safety for food when exposed to high nest temperatures” (Animal Behaviour)
    • “Great Gerbils (Rhombomys opimus) in Central Asia Are Spreading to Higher Latitudes and Altitudes” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “Large Reductions in Temperate Rainforest Biome Due to Unmitigated Climate Change” (Earth’s Future)
    • “Lead-based ammunition is a threat to the endangered New Zealand Kea (Nestor notabilis)” (Conservation Letters)
    • “Madagascar’s proposed domestic rosewood trade undermines species protection and exposes fatal flaws in the CITES regime” (Madagascar Conservation & Development)
    • “Native plants play crucial role in buffering against severity of exotic plant invasions in freshwater ecosystems” (Biological Conservation)
    • “Nearly half of Colombian artisan craft plant species lack national and international vulnerability assessments” (Ecosystems and People)
    • “Predicting conservation priority areas in Borneo for the critically endangered helmeted hornbill (Rhinoplax vigil)” (Global Ecology and Conservation)
    • “Predicting the potential habitat of bears under a changing climate in Nepal” (Environmental Monitoring and Assessment)
    • “Requiem for Argentine mammals: A spatial framework for mapping extinction risk,” (Journal of Nature Conservation)
    • “Sacred Groves and the Conservation of Forest Genetic Resources: a review” (Egyptian Academic Journal of Biological Sciences)
    • “The Trojan seahorse: citizen science pictures of a seahorse harbour insights into the distribution and behaviour of a long-overlooked polychaete worm” (Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences)
    • “‘Vampire birds’: diet metabarcoding reveals that migrating Woodchat Shrikes Lanius senator consume engorged camel ticks in a desert stopover site” (Journal of African Ornithology)

The Interplay of Lions and African Wild Dogs

These papers, which examine some of the same species but share no authors, deserve to be looked at in unison:

Focus on Microplastics

This month also featured a lot of research on microplastics — as many as 10 papers a day, by my count. Here’s a small selection focusing on microplastics’ effects on wildlife. This weighs a little more heavily on subscription-access papers, but many of these are open access.

    • “Bibliometric Insights into Microplastic Pollution in Freshwater Ecosystems” (Water)
    • “The dual role of coastal mangroves: Sinks and sources of microplastics in rapidly urbanizing areas” (Journal of Hazardous Materials)
    • “Ecotoxicological Impact of Cigarette Butts on Coastal Ecosystems: The Case of Marbella Beach, Chile” (Sustainability)
    • “From insects to mammals! Tissue accumulation and transgenerational transfer of micro/nano-plastics through the food chain” (Journal of Hazardous Materials)
    • “Is pollution giving fish a headache? Biomarker analysis in fish brains from Danube floodplain” (13th International Symposium Kopački Rit: Past, Present, Future 2024)
    • “Microplastics alter the functioning of marine microbial ecosystems” (Ecology and Evolution)
    • “Microplastics and terrestrial birds: a review on plastic ingestion in ecological linchpins” (Journal of Ornithology)
    • “Microplastics in Animals: The Silent Invasion” (Pollutants)
    • “Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) microplastics affect angiogenesis and central nervous system (CNS) development of duck embryo” (Emerging Contaminants)
    • “Unraveling Plastic Pollution in Protected Terrestrial Raptors Using Regurgitated Pellets” (Microplastics)

Our next column will be a bit different: We want to share researchers’ favorite peer-reviewed papers of 2024. For consideration, drop us a line at [email protected] and use the subject line TMICS. Send us a link, your name and institution, and 1-3 sentences about why you think readers should check out your paper. We’re eager to hear from you, especially if you’re from the Global South or an institution without much public-relations support. (Deadline: Dec. 10, 2024.)

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Previously in The Revelator:

This Month in Conservation Science: ‘The Earth Is Dying, Bro’

Protect This Place: Ladakh, the Planet’s ‘Third Pole’

Home to glaciers, snow leopards, and rich human cultures, Ladakh suffers from a lack of political representation, which has inspired recent protests.

The Place:

Ladakh, India’s cold desert, is located to the east of Jammu and Kashmir at altitudes between 8,800 and 18,000 feet. This mountain enclave is geographically distinct, with unique climatic and ecological characteristics fostering a rich culture amidst towering peaks. Ladakh is marked by steep cliffs, deep valleys, arid plains, salt flats, and sparse vegetation. Situated between Pakistan and China, it nurtures a population of around 275,000 people, as well as rare and beautiful wildlife such as snow leopards and Tibetan antelopes.

Ladakh

The people and wildlife here depend on the Hindu Kush ranges to the northwest for essential resources. The other mountain ranges surrounding the Ladakh, the Karakoram to the north and the Himalayan to the south, are some of the highest in the world. Together known as the Hindu Kush Himalaya, these ranges are often referred to as the “Third Pole.” They feature the world’s most renowned peaks, clad in over 30,000 square miles of glacial ice — the largest concentration of glaciers outside the Arctic and Antarctic.

Why It Matters:

High-altitude regions have fragile ecosystems and experience the effects of climate change more acutely and earlier, which also makes them indicators of broader climate trends. This allows scientists to study shifts in weather phenomena, migration, and ecosystem responses along with the tectonic processes involved in the region’s varied geology.

A rich diversity of medicinal plants can be found here, such as Himalayan yew, known for cancer-fighting properties; ashwagandha, used for stress relief; and ginger, valued for anti-inflammatory benefits. Protecting these unique environments is essential to sustaining traditional medicine practices and preserving these invaluable resources.

Ladakh

Ladakh is home to a rich tapestry of cultures, traditions, and religions, including Buddhism and Islam. Its monasteries, festivals, and unique lifestyles provide insights into how diverse ways of living have adapted to harsh conditions. The area’s unique wildlife play essential roles in nutrient cycling and maintaining ecological balance: Himalayan blue sheep, also known as bharal, graze on alpine meadows, while Himalayan marmots aerate the soil and serve as prey for other species.

The Threat:

The local ecosystems in Ladakh, and the more than 1.2 billion people downstream, depend on glaciers for their freshwater supply. As the permafrost thaws, concerns about potential pandemics from viral spillover have surfaced.

Recently a collaborative effort of Ohio State’s Byrd Center and Chinese Academy of Sciences isolated 33 viruses from ice samples in the Tibetan Plateau, 28 of which were novel and estimated to be approximately 15,000 years old. The runoff from glacier melt has furthered the risk of introducing diseases into vulnerable communities.

Ladakh landscapes 36

Recent examples of mega-scale flash floods and landslides underscore the impact of man-made disasters and the urgent need for new policies.

Militarization has occurred in Ladakh due to its strategic location and geopolitical conflicts. Unregulated tourism, construction, global warming, and various forms of pollution are worsening the situation. Snow in the glaciers melts faster as black soot from fossil fuels settle on the snow and ice and absorb the sunlight they would normally reflect.

Ladakh

Water contamination is another major concern, and flooding has altered soil functions, microbial communities, and soil redox potential. Floods cause soil erosion, nutrient loss, and siltation of water bodies, reducing the already constrained agriculture yield in the region.

Ladakhis also lack access to essential healthcare facilities and services that reflect their needs and support their wellbeing. A decade of unfulfilled promises has left residents feeling politically marginalized and skeptical of policymakers, especially concerning healthcare and land rights. Recent amendments to forest laws allow forest land use for nonforest purposes, jeopardizing biodiversity and Indigenous livelihoods and deepening distrust.

Who Is Protecting It Now:

Ladakh activist Sonam Wangchuk and others have spent the past few months fasting, protesting, and educating the community, with the goal of bringing more autonomy to the region.

Wangchuk’s dedication to innovation and sustainable development has earned him numerous accolades, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award, often referred to as Asia’s Nobel Prize, in 2018. His initiatives — including ice stupas, artificial glaciers that store water — highlight time-tested and Indigenous innovations in the face of climate challenges.

While he envisions a future of innovative development and education for all, Wangchuk is particularly currently focused on preservation of ecosystem in Ladakh. With the extreme conditions and limited resources, the Ladakh protests are addressing the need for reforms to support the unique challenges faced by the region and he is the face of the protests.

What This Place Needs:

The ongoing protests in Ladakh reflect a desire for political representation and autonomy and are aimed at preserving ecological integrity and Tribal rights.

Among the primary demands are full statehood within India, recognition as a Scheduled Tribe under the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution for legislative and administrative control, and the implementation of policies aimed at safeguarding Ladakh’s fragile ecosystem while balancing developmental needs and local participation.

Basgo citadel, Ladakh

Ladakhis have reason to be worried: The government of India has plans for massive solar and hydroelectric projects that come with substantial environmental and social costs, including biodiversity loss, land degradation from extensive solar farms, and alterations in local water flows. Socially these projects have the potential to displace communities and lead to external control over local resources, and eventually the influx of workers would pose a threat to the Ladakhi livelihoods and culture.

Lessons From the Fight:

The people of Ladakh teach us spiritual resilience.

The unique demographics of the region, with its blend of Buddhist and Muslim populations, foster a sense of solidarity in advocating for local governance and sustainable development. As both groups confront external pressures from national policies and environmental changes, their collective efforts symbolize a shared commitment to protect their heritage and secure their futures in an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape. This collaboration highlights a broader geopolitical context, as both communities face common challenges related to resource management, healthcare access, and demands for statehood.

Traditional practices, often overlooked, can play a crucial role in sustainability. Empowering small-scale and indigenous communities helps preserve their knowledge and ways of life. One possible answer is economic localization, which prioritizes local, sustainable practices like ecotourism that celebrate rather than exploit local culture. Small-scale green energy projects can reduce reliance on fossil fuels, protecting delicate ecosystems. Water conservation, forest management, and incentives for local businesses should replace resource extraction by large corporations. Fast-paced change often overlooks the science behind traditional practices that can help save our planet.

Follow the Fight:

Himalayan Institute of Alternatives Ladakh

Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL)

Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight. 

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Previously in The Revelator:

Protect This Place: The Mountainous Ulu Masen Ecosystem

Salmon Have Returned Above the Klamath River Dams. Now What?

As the fish swim back to places they haven’t reached for more than a century, scientists will watch for signs of the watershed’s recovery.

The removal of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in southern Oregon and Northern California has been recognized as the largest dam removal in U.S. history. More notably, it’s also the largest salmon-restoration project to date.

In late September I watched an excavator take large bites out of the cofferdam at Iron Gate, the most downstream of the dams.

Photo: Juliet Grable

Just over two weeks later, a crew spotted a pair of salmon spawning in one of the tributaries above Iron Gate, where the fish had not previously been able to reach. On Oct. 16 biologists spied fall Chinook salmon at the mouth of a tributary in Oregon. This spot, 230 miles from the ocean, is above all four of the former dam sites.

The speed of the salmon’s return has astonished even the most seasoned biologists.

“Even though we’ve been anticipating the moment, it’s not until you see that first Chinook…I don’t know; I’m still in shock,” says Mark Hereford, project leader of the Klamath anadromous restoration program at Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, who found the fish in the Oregon tributary.

Photo: ODFW

News of the salmon’s return prompted a flurry of texts and excited phone calls among fish advocates. Their return is especially poignant to members of the Klamath Tribes, whose ancestral lands include the upper Klamath Basin above the dam sites. With the construction of the dams, salmon, or c’iyaals, had been absent from the Upper Basin for over 100 years.

Now attention is shifting from the massive dam-removal project to the equally enormous task ahead: restoring the Klamath watershed. Biologists will look to the fish themselves for guidance.

All Hands on Deck

The Klamath River supports fall and spring Chinook, coho, and steelhead, along with other important species like Pacific lamprey. All are expected to benefit from dam removal.

Biologists are using every means possible to detect and track salmon as they explore their new habitat. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has installed “video weirs” to capture images of salmon in key tributaries; the agency also has crews on the ground surveying spawning salmon. Also in California, the nonprofit Cal Trout has installed a sonar monitoring station just above the former Iron Gate dam. Cal Trout is also leading a project to sample fish using special nets near the Iron Gate dam site; these hands-on surveys will provide a week-by-week snapshot of fish in the river. The crew are fitting some of these fish with radio tags and passive integrated transponders, or PIT tags, so they can track them as they move upstream.

In the upper basin, ODFW is working with the Klamath Tribes, university researchers, and other partners to conduct spawning surveys and set up monitoring stations to detect tagged fish.

“It will help us answer the question: Are fish moving into the new habitat, and if so, what species?” says Hereford.

This intensive monitoring will continue for at least four years. Besides informing restoration, the efforts will also reveal how fish respond to some of the challenging conditions in the upper basin.

The Klamath River starts in Upper Klamath Lake in southern Oregon and passes through two small dams before crossing into California.

Most of the vast wetlands surrounding Upper Klamath Lake were converted into farmland over a century ago. The lake is naturally productive, thanks to volcanic soils high in phosphorus, but the removal of filtering wetlands and channelization of tributaries above the lake let in a flood of nutrients. The lake is frequently plagued with large algae blooms and poor water quality.

There’s ideal habitat in the tributaries above Upper Klamath Lake, but to reach it, cold water-loving salmon must navigate an expanse of warm, shallow, and at times oxygen-poor water. How will they fare?

To get a jump on this question, fisheries biologists have been releasing young hatchery-bred spring Chinook into tributaries above the lake.

What they’ve witnessed is encouraging, says Hereford, who is leading the project, now in its third year. They’ve detected fish everywhere they’ve set up monitoring stations. What’s more, fish are finding cold, spring-fed pockets in the lake.

“Some of them are able to find that cold water refuge and staying there the whole summer, which is great,” says Hereford. There’s abundant food in these cold pockets, which allows the fish to grow nice and big before they head downstream toward the ocean. Bigger fish generally survive better, says Hereford.

The young spring Chinook they release later this fall will actually have the chance to reach the ocean.

“This year will be really interesting because it’s the first time we’ve released fish into a free-flowing river,” says Hereford.

Young fish moving downstream and adults swimming upstream will still have to navigate two small dams that were not removed. Both have fish ladders, but the openings in the ladders are too small for large adult salmon to pass through. (This problem will be fixed: A feasibility study is already underway.)

Radio-tagged and PIT-tagged juveniles will tell biologists how they’re getting through the dams and inform future solutions to improve passage.

Long-Term Recovery

Large dams have contributed to steep declines in salmon runs across the West.

“When we have dams in place, we have a lot of constraints on salmon,” says Shari Witmore, fish biologist, West Coast Region at NOAA Fisheries. “Layer on climate change, water management, and diversions, and that further constrains their ability to respond to local conditions and access different types of habitat. Overall, it’s more of a struggle to have sustainable, diverse populations.”

As the pioneering fall Chinook demonstrate, they’re good at finding cold, spring-fed streams. Now that the dams are gone, they can access more of them.

“When you’re talking about a large and diverse system like the Klamath, the tributaries and the main stem all work together like a family,” says Michael Belchik, senior fisheries biologist at the Yurok Tribe. “Some of the tributaries are cold-water refuges when the main stem Klamath gets warm.”

The dams on the Klamath didn’t just physically block fish; they starved downstream reaches of the sediment and gravel they need to construct their nests, or redds. The reservoirs also acted like giant heat sinks, altering temperatures downstream. They harbored massive algae blooms that compromised water quality and submerged cold springs that are ideal spawning grounds.

Already Belchik has noted the return of cooler temperatures to the river, which bodes well for the fall run of Chinook.

“If we’re seeing a couple fish here or there in certain tributaries, we’re going to see a lot more in the upcoming years as the river recovers, the clarity returns, and the spawning gravels are revealed,” says Belchik.

Dam removal is just the beginning. As exciting as it is to see the return of salmon to their historic habitat on the Klamath River, it will take several fish generations for them to establish sustainable populations, says Witmore.

Other large dam-decommissioning projects have shown that fish often respond quickly to removal of physical barriers. After two dams were removed from the Elwha River in southwest Washington between 2011 and 2014, steelhead returned to habitat above the dam sites almost immediately. Chinook salmon have also rebounded, albeit more slowly. Last year the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe was able to open a small subsistence and ceremonial coho salmon fishery — an important milestone in the recovery of these fish populations.

Restoring Habitat

Jenny Creek is one of the first tributaries to flow into the Klamath River above the Iron Gate dam. Before and after photos illustrate the dramatic effects of dam removal.

My “before” picture, from September of 2023, was taken from a bridge that passes over the creek right before it entered the Iron Gate reservoir. Fat and sluggish, the backed-up creek is painted with swirls of green algae. You can’t smell the anaerobic rot, but it’s not hard to imagine.

Photo: Juliet Grable

A year later, the water runs clear, dancing around boulders and past willows that have spontaneously sprouted along the banks.

Photo: Juliet Grable

“If you look at Jenny Creek and the Klamath main stem itself in the Iron Gate reservoir footprint, you see thousands, tens of thousands of willows coming up,” says Belchik. “A whole riparian forest is being reborn even right now.”

This tributary is one of several targeted for restoration in this and the other reservoir footprints. Crews have already been sculpting floodplains and planting new vegetation on bare ground that was uncovered when the reservoirs were drained. They’re also placing whole trees, with their roots intact, across streams to help create pools and spawning habitat.

Restoration is taking place not just in the reservoir footprints but throughout the watershed. Even groups that have historically clashed over water are cooperating to get this work done. Just last month the Klamath Water Users Association and several Tribes announced they had agreed on 19 restoration projects throughout the basin.

The old tensions are still there: Water remains a scarce resource with too many demands on it. But there does seem to be a newfound understanding that we all benefit from a healthy Klamath watershed.

Meanwhile everything biologists and other scientists are learning on the Klamath will add to the body of knowledge around dam removal.

“What are the consequences? What happens to the fish afterward? What if there’s spawning areas below the dam? What happens with the sediment?” says Belchik. “We’re going to be able to answer these questions better and better as we move forward.”

A Triumphant Return

On Nov. 3 I took my husband Brint to see the Chinook spawning at one of the tributaries. By then biologists on spawning surveys had counted more than 100 fish on a single day in that stream alone.

We walked downstream. The creek is only calf-deep in places, but the 30-inch salmon were not easy to spot. We had to learn to see the dark, undulating torpedo shapes.

The landscape opened up as we neared the confluence with the Klamath. This part of the creek had been submerged under a reservoir less than a year ago. It was treeless, and the mud adjacent to the stream banks had dried and cracked into blocks.

As we walked we were joined by others curious to witness history — hunters who were camping nearby and families on a Sunday outing. Several kids tested their balance on the large logs that had been placed across the stream, looking for fish.

“Salmon!” a boy screamed, pointing. A startled Chinook breached with a splash, then darted downstream. The boy’s mom explained why it was important not to disturb the fish while they were hard at work making more salmon.

Photo: Juliet Grable

Brint and I grinned at each other. We too were screaming “salmon,” though silently: the simple thrill of seeing these big, beautiful fish amplified by the triumph of their homecoming.

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Previously in The Revelator:

The Monumental Effort to Replant the Klamath River Dam Reservoirs

Bringing Back the Pacific Lamprey

The 450-million-year-old fish is crucial for the Yakama Nation’s health and culture — and the region’s ecology.

Originally published by The Columbian through the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication News Fellowship. Republished under a Creative Commons license.

WOODLAND — Biologist Dave’y Lumley paced the shallow water at the mouth of the Lewis River on an overcast morning in late September. With each step, she carefully scanned the water in front of her, holding two hockey sticklike probes just under the surface.

“My mind goes blank on everything else and what I’m looking for is any slight movement,” Lumley said.

She and a colleague from the Yakama Nation’s Pacific Lamprey Project, Noah Sampson, were looking for larval lamprey — a difficult task because the fish can be less than an inch long at this stage of development.

Pacific lamprey

The probes connect to a beeping, gauge-covered backpack, known as an electrofisher. Together, the rig works by gently shocking the water about three times a second to tease out young lamprey from the riverbed so they can be caught, counted and studied before being released.

This research was part of a three-day trip Lumley and Sampson, both Yakama Nation members, made to Southwest Washington to survey lamprey populations in the Wind, Washougal, Lewis and Cowlitz rivers, as well as some creeks — likely for the first time.

But it’s only one small part of the nation’s 15-year effort to restore Pacific lamprey populations to their former abundance in the Columbia River Basin after dams, habitat destruction, industrial pollution, ocean overfishing, climate change and other factors brought the important native fish species to the brink of local extinction.

What Are Lamprey?

While the Columbia River as we know it today was shaped by a series of floods about 15,000 years ago, lamprey date back much further.

At about 450 million years old, the eel-like fish evolved when Pangaea didn’t yet exist, the first trees hadn’t yet sprouted and the Pacific Northwest wouldn’t emerge from under the ocean for another couple hundred million years.

Lampreys’ life cycle starts when they hatch in gravelly streambeds and swim to slower-moving water. They then spend the next three to 10 years burrowed in the sand and silt, filter and deposit feeding.

Pacific Lamprey release

Then, juveniles go through a metamorphosis and swim to the ocean, where they spend the next one to seven years using their hallmark “sucking disk” to attach to and feed on larger host fish. From there, they head back to rivers and streams like the ones where they were born, spending up to two years there before mating and dying.

In preparation for their Southwest Washington trip, Lumley and Sampson searched Google Earth, looking for sites along the rivers that appeared to have the sediment that creates ideal habitat for young lamprey.

Publicly accessible sites, including the ones visited that day, are ideal. But if she sees a privately owned spot she likes, Lumley has a few tricks up her sleeve.

“I don’t have a problem talking to landowners. Worst they can say is ‘No,’ ” she said. “We will go and make phone calls and send emails, go knock on the door because trespassing is not good, and we keep good relationships with people because then we can keep coming back every year.”

Lamprey Hide-and-Seek

The first step in restoring lamprey populations is finding out if any are in a river. The team does this by picking three 1-square-meter plots at a site and checking them for larval lamprey with the electrofisher. They then use those findings to establish how many are in a broader area.

Lumley was carefully pacing through the first plot of the first site to the electrofisher’s waltzlike beeps — one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three — when the day’s first lamprey darted from the sand.

“We got one, so they are here,” Lumley said. She smiled as she netted the small fish and deposited it in a bucket Sampson held.

Despite that promising start, it was the only lamprey the pair found at that site — or the next two. But even one fish was enough to collect important data.

Back on shore, Lumley wrangled the wriggling pinky-sized fish to measure it as Sampson collected and read off data about water and sediment depth, as well as pH.

The three-day survey trip comes after the Yakama Nation’s restoration efforts have achieved growing success in Central Washington, and especially in the Yakima River Basin.

The basin has seen higher numbers of juveniles heading to the Pacific Ocean and adults are starting to return, Ralph Lampman, leader of the Yakama Nation Pacific Lamprey Project, told The Columbian in September.

In fact, lamprey returns to the Yakima sub-basin grew fivefold from the 2000s to the 2010s, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

And while the data collected that day in September covered a worksheet front and back, surveys make up a small part of the broader restoration program. The Yakama Nation runs the program in partnership with other groups, including the Nez Perce Tribe, Warm Springs Tribe, Umatilla Tribe and Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, as well as agencies including the Bonneville Power Administration and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Lumley used a tiny pair of scissors to delicately snip a fin for the Yakama Nation’s genetic monitoring program.

“I’m just going at the very back of the second dorsal and I’m just taking a little sliver,” she said.

The Yakama Nation also operates the world’s first full Pacific lamprey hatchery, Lampman said. Some of its other programs include education and outreach, training lamprey researchers from around the world and doing “translocations” — that’s when biologists truck returning fish past the dams to spawning sites throughout the Columbia Basin.

Why Save Lamprey?

This work started following the revelation that returns of the foundational Columbia River species had collapsed.

Bonneville Dam counted passing lamprey from when it opened in 1938 until 1969. In the years after the count resumed in 1999, the highest yearly returns of that period were still only roughly one-third of the highest returns of the earlier era.

And even those high returns during the mid-1900s were just a fraction of pre-dam returns, which lamprey biologists say numbered potentially in the millions.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates many of the dams, estimates roughly half of the lamprey that attempt to pass a dam succeed — and that’s for each dam. There are nine dams on the mainstem Columbia before fish reach the impassable Chief Joseph Dam, and hundreds more across the Snake River and other tributaries.

However, dams aren’t the only threat to lamprey. Habitat loss, ocean overfishing, climate change and other factors have hurt lamprey, too.

To Lumley, there is a brutal irony in the fact a species that survived 450 million years is now threatened within only a couple hundred years of the arrival of Euro-American settlers and industrial infrastructure —like dams.

“It’s unfortunate but it makes sense,” Lumley said. “We’re actually physically putting in an impassable barrier. But they’re still here, so hopefully they’ll outlive us.”

Cultural, Ecological Role

The pair and their gear — which Lumley says is often likened to something out of the movie “Ghostbusters” — have a way of starting conversations.

Lumley says the exchanges are a chance to conduct “impromptu educational outreach” about lamprey.

“Are they good to eat?” one angler asked.

“They’re good, yeah. They’re very high nutrition, high oils, vitamins, minerals, stuff like that,” Lumley said. “Little bit more than salmon — also they’re food for everything. Everything eats them.”

It’s those nutrients that get at the heart of the fish’s importance in the Columbia Basin — both to ecosystems and Native nations, Michael Buck said. He’s a Yakama Nation member and a researcher studying the history and intellectual traditions of Native people in the Columbia River Plateau.

While his recent research has involved interviewing dozens of Yakama elders to understand the role of lamprey in the nation’s life before settlers and dams arrived, he got his start when he was much younger.

“Our entire family from Priest Rapids Village would caravan all the way (to Willamette Falls) for a day-and-a-half of eeling,” he said, referring to lamprey with the shorthand name many Native people have long used.

From conversations with elders, Buck found the nation’s relationship to lamprey is just as deep and important as with salmon.

“The eel was important to children, to toddlers who were teething. The eel tail was used for a pacifier,” he said. “The dried eel tail, the oil was used for different medicines, like earaches and cleansing, and it was also a connection to stamina. The eel oil gave you stamina to be a strong fisherman, a strong horse rider.”

Buck, who also works as a traditional medicine practitioner at Seattle Indian Health Board, said the “quick, nutritious grab” was a part of what kept Native communities vital, and with its collapse, health problems arose.

“This stereotype came from starvation — the stereotypical alcoholic Indian with no teeth, diabetes. That’s something that the government gave to us,” he said. “The eel made us strong and fast and clean in our blood.”

(Members of the Yakama Nation have been arrested as recently as the 1980s for salmon fishing, despite that right being enshrined in treaties the U.S. made with them.)

But it hasn’t only been Native communities who have suffered without lampreys’ former abundance. Salmon and lamprey have been migrating together for as long as salmon have existed, Buck pointed out. And both the younger, more popular fish and the broader regional ecosystems need lamprey to function properly.

To Lumley, the best way to understand that is to think of the larval lamprey as doing for the river what an earthworm does for a garden.

“They churn it, they aerate it, break down organic matter and they’re good for everything,” she said. “Everything will eat them.”

It’s that importance — both cultural and ecological — that drives Lumley in her goal of restoring lamprey populations so harvests can return to what they were only a handful of generations ago.

While she didn’t taste the fish or even know much about it until she was in her early 20s, she wants other Yakama members at a young age to get to learn about lamprey and its importance — and to try it.

“When we do an educational outreach booth, we set up an aquarium with live fish so people can actually see them up close and touch them, pick them up,” she said. “It’s great being able to tie tribal youth to a traditional food source.”

Growing returns in the Yakima Basin have boosted that outreach work, and enabled them to bring back fish for members who can’t harvest them, including children and older people.

“It is very meaningful to me. I love this job,” Lumley said.

Over the past decade, she has worked her way through a college degree, and from a seasonal technician to fish biologist. She said she can’t see herself doing anything else.

It’s work that, in addition to passion and knowledge, requires and rewards a hopeful disposition: While the Lewis River only yielded one larval lamprey, Lumley and Sampson went on to find more than 60 at sites along the Cowlitz River.

“It was a really good day for lamprey,” Lumley said.

Previously in The Revelator:

Newest Flock of Wild California Condors Faces an Old Threat: Lead Poisoning

Species Spotlight: Bengal Floricans, Nearing Their Last Dance?

Every year these critically endangered birds perform artistic aerial feats to charm potential mates. But if things don’t change, we may see their last dance soon.

Species name:

Bengal florican (Houbaropsis bengalensis)

Description:

Bengal floricans are ground-dwelling birds in the bustard family. The females tend to be slightly larger than males, and the sexes have very different plumage. Adult males sport a black neck and head with a small crest, a mottled brown-and-black back, and pristine white wing bars prominent in flight. The characteristic elongated feathers on their breasts are puffed out during territorial and courtship displays. Females, on the other hand, are more of a muted brown hue with pale underparts and some streaking on their backs. The species is perhaps best known for the male’s elegant courtship display: The strutting, neck fluffing, jumping, and humming are best described as an “aerial dance.”

Where They’re Found:

There are two known subspecies with disjunct distributions. Houbaropsis bengalensis bengalensis is found in the Ganga and Brahmaputra floodplains of the Himalayan foothills in India and Nepal. The other, H. b. blandini, inhabits the Tonle Sap floodplains of Cambodia, and a few individuals may be present in Vietnam. A former population in Bangladesh has ceased to exist.

Bengal floricans are specialists of wet alluvial grasslands, having short grasses with scattered bushes and long grass tufts. Such habitats in the Indian subcontinent are now largely confined to national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, where they’re managed by annual burning practices. From Dr. Ravi Sankaran’s formative research on this species in Dudhwa National Park, we know that the birds appear in grassland patches within 2-5 weeks of their burning.

1831 illustration from A century of birds from the Himalaya Mountains (public domain)

Known to travel short distances between seasons, Bengal floricans now often find themselves in agricultural lands adjoining protected areas. For example, Koklabari Seed Farm, adjacent to Manas National Park, sees as many as 27 floricans in monsoon season — over one-third of its entire population in the national park, according to recent research.

IUCN Status:

Bengal floricans have been listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List since 2008 due to mounting threats to their grassland habitat and sharp population declines. The population in Cambodia is feared to have decreased by almost 80% in just three generations (30 years), putting the species among the most threatened bustards in the world.

Major Threats:

The threats to Bengal floricans stem directly from threats to the grassland habitat they’re so dependent upon. Being highly productive flatlands, this habitat is highly sought after for cultivation. In Cambodia large swathes of grassland are being converted to “intensive, industrial-scale, irrigated rice fields.” In India and Nepal, little grassland remains outside protected areas.

Even where there are protected grasslands in the floricans’ range, the management may not suit the needs of this species, as the focus is usually on charismatic large mammals such as Asian elephants or greater one-horned rhinos.

Woody encroachment into Terai grasslands is being noted across the Himalayan foothills, pushing Bengal floricans closer to the brink. Illegal grazing and invasive plant species taking over grasslands are also likely to pose threats, although their impacts are yet to be understood.

A typical wet grassland habitat, the Terai-Duars region of West Bengal, from where Bengal florican may have disappeared. Photo: Nisha Bhakat

Another emerging threat is overhead power lines. During a study in Cambodia, six Bengal floricans were found dead after collisions with lines.

Notable Conservation Programs or Legal Protections:

Given its threat status, the species receives the highest degree of legal protection across much of its range. In India floricans are on Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972; in Nepal they appear on Schedule I of the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act, 1973; and Cambodia considers the species to be amongst its highest conservation priorities.

Cambodia, in fact, has created protected areas called Bengal Florican Conservation Areas (BFCAs) with community-based management where the birds can coexist with traditional farmers. In 2024 Nepal launched a 10-year action plan for the birds’ conservation, with multiple proposed avenues such as carrying out annual burning before the breeding season, ex-situ conservation and breeding programs, satellite tracking of individuals to better understand habitat use, deepening understanding of species ecology, and so on. In India a nonprofit organization called Aaranyak is carrying out a Bengal Florican Conservation Project in collaboration with several governmental and nongovernmental entities.

Two Bengal florican chicks being hand-reared at the Angkor Centre for Conservation of Biodiversity, Cambodia. Photo: Maria Blümm Rexach/ACCB via IUCN

Now in a first, Bengal florican eggs laid in the wild are being carefully hatched and then raised at a conservation center led by Angkor Centre for Conservation of Biodiversity in Cambodia. They make up an assurance population against extinction of the blandini subspecies. For a species that had never been kept in captivity before, this is quite a remarkable feat. Against all odds, and a prediction this subspecies would be extinct by 2023, conservation actions like this show all may not be lost just yet.

My Experience:

Bengal floricans have almost, if not totally, vanished from Bengal, the state after which they are named. Growing up in that state as a birdwatcher and reading old trip reports, I always dreamed of seeing one in Jaldapara or Gorumara National Park. My closest encounter with the species continues to be through the eyes and words of others, perhaps most intimately while reading Dr. Ravi Sankaran’s extensive field notes from Dudhwa. One can almost picture an adult male foraging in the Satiana grassland patch, pausing briefly as a peafowl calls not too far away. It partially inflates its neck as a show of territoriality, but soon resorts to preening. Just after sunset, it gets flushed and flies off into the dusk toward Chapra grassland.

This sight is a thing of the past, as recent surveys have failed to locate any Bengal floricans in Dudhwa National Park. Despite us having decent knowledge of the species’ ecology and requirements since the 1990s, populations continue to decline alarmingly.

But the forest of wildlife conservation sprouts from seeds of hope. Perhaps the many conservation projects targeting this species will turn the tide and one day Bengal floricans will reclaim the grasslands in the Terai-Duars of Bengal.

Key Research:

    1. Rahmani, A.R., Narayan, G., Sankaran, R. and Rosalind, L. eds. (1988). The Bengal Florican: Status and Ecology. Annual Report. Bombay Natural History Society, Bombay.
    2. Rahmani, A.R., Narayan, G., Rosalind, L., Sankaran, R. and Ganguli-Lachungpa, U. (1991). Status of the Bengal Florican Houbaropsis bengalensis in India. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. 88: 349-375.
    3. Baral, H.S., Ram, A.K., Chaudhary, B., Basnet, S., Chaudhary, D., Timsina, A., Acharya, S., Bidari K., Acharya, S., Acharya, B., Thulung, P., Karki, A., Acharya, K.P. (2013). Survey of Bengal Florican Houbaropsis bengalensis bengalensis (Gmelin, 1789)(Gruiformes: Otididae) in the Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve and adjoining areas, Nepal Journal of Threatened Taxa. 5(7): 4076-4083. http://www.threatenedtaxa.org/ZooPrintJournal/2013/April/o324026iv134076-4083.pdf
    4. Packman, C.E., Showler, D.A., Collar, N.J., Son Virak, Mahood, S.P., Handschuh, M., Evans, T. D., Hong Chamnan and Dolman, P. M. (2014). Rapid decline of the largest remaining population of Bengal Florican Houbaropsis bengalensis and recommendations for its conservation. Bird Conservation International. 24: 429–437.

Note: Dr. Ravi Sankaran’s research on Bengal floricans remains one of the most extensive works done on this species’ behavior and ecology. Even more information can be found in his field notes than in the many reports and papers he published. At a time where grassland habitats are severely threatened, these notes can provide valuable information to inform conservation action Dr. Sankaran’s papers are housed in the Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences and are available for research reference.

Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight. 

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Previously in The Revelator:

Protect This Place: Saving India’s Shola Sky Islands

‘Like a Phoenix,’ A New Forest Emerges From the Destruction in Ukraine

Russia’s bombing of Kakhovka Dam in 2023 killed hundreds of people and tens of thousands of animals, but it’s also provided a potential ecological reset.

In the early hours of June 6, 2023, two large explosions reverberated across cities and small towns located on the banks of the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine. The Russian military had reportedly set off multiple bombs, destroying the three-kilometer-long Kakhovka Dam and draining its massive reservoir into nearby settlements.

Water from the dam flooded the plains, killing hundreds of civilians and countless livestock, destroying farms, and displacing the residents of more than 37,000 homes.

The bombing made headlines around the world. However, it’s the long-term impact of the attack on the local biodiversity that has scientists and experts concerned. In the weeks following the explosion, researchers from Ukrainian ministries and independent organizations carried out several assessments as best they could to the backdrop of the war.

They found that the attack had flooded about 60,000 hectares (230 square miles) of forest in at least four national parks, threatening an estimated population of 20,000 animals and 10,000 birds.

“Almost all aquatic vegetation had died, and much of the marine life had disappeared, including mollusks,” says Serhiiy Skoryk, director of Kamianska Sich National Park in Kherson, one of the regions affected. “Those that survived moved downstream,” says the scientist-turned-freedom fighter.

The deluge also dislodged many landmines in the heavy conflict region, moving them downstream into farms and residential areas.

The researchers found an equally deadly if less obvious threat: Industrial pollutants previously captured in the reservoir’s sediments had contaminated the flood zones and the Black Sea.

Another report by the Ukrainian Scientific Center for Marine Ecology, published just months after the destruction of the dam, also showed high evidence of pollution in the Black Sea, including heavy metals such as copper, zinc, and arsenic compounds.

“All that water from the reservoir contains contaminant particles, along with carcasses of the animals that died during the flood, most of which ended in the sea, which is now polluted,” says Oleksiy Vasyliuk, an environmental scientist from Ukraine who has been documenting the ecological impact of the war.

One of the hardest hit groups of species was mussels, “filter feeders” who help purify water. With populations of these animals significantly reduced, Vasyliuk expresses worry that these pollutants could enter the human food chain.

Satellite data shows the dramatic drying of the Kakhovka reservoir bottom that has been transforming the landscape in 2023-2024. Source: EOS Data Analytics

The war has made an already bad situation for many species even worse. “Even before the war, the ecology of Ukraine was endangered, but the Russian invasion attacks have caused serious threats to Ukrainian biodiversity,” says Anastasia Drapaliuk, project coordinator at Tellus Conservation in Ukraine.

In a paper for the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group, Drapaliuk and other experts noted that wildlife across 5,000 square kilometers (1,930 square miles) faced catastrophic effects from the flood, including rare species of birds, mammals, reptiles, and insects. “Populations of some species were dealt a possibly greater blow in one day on June 6 than in the last 100 years,” they wrote.

But amidst the destruction, something unexpected has emerged.

Baby Forests

“Despite the challenges, our colleagues have been making regular expeditions to the affected area,” says Vasyliuk. “Three months after the attack they were shocked to find vegetation and forests in part of the reservoir that was left dry after the dam collapse.” They documented a young willow forest making its way through the dry cracked soil left behind by the floods. “It was unbelievable; no one expected to see the greenery they found, or that such a thing could happen amidst these tragic events,” he adds, the thrill of the discovering still evident in his voice.

Where they feared desertification, a thick forest of largely willow trees (Salix alba), some reaching as high as six meters, now occupies about 150,000 hectares (930 square miles) of land that had once been covered by the reservoir.

New vegetation emerges. Photo: Serhiiy Skoryk

Vasyliuk hypothesizes that despite the absence of fertile soil, the forest flourished because of the organic mass left behind by the lost animals and plants, including dead species such as the mollusks.

“It is possible the organic particles from these mollusks and other materials fed and nourished the forests like fertilizers,” he says. “The entire mechanism [that led to the birth of a new forest] is yet to be studied, because what we found was a lot of cross-breaded seeds among indigenous trees.”

Still, it seems a cause for celebration. “It was very great,” he says, adding that the forest was the “only good thing to happened since the Russian attacks have damaged much of the local environment.”

Skoryk echoes that: “Nature was healing herself, and all we have to do is to not interfere and let her take charge. Like a phoenix, in the form of a new forest, was rising from this tragedy,” he says.

Drapaliuk looks at the growth from a longer perspective. The way she sees it, the nature in the region has been given a bit of a reset: It’s simply reviving its original biodiversity, “Before the Soviet Union, this was a historically significant region, not just for the Cossacks [indigenous Ukrainian tribes] but also for the biodiversity. It was the wetlands, a place for many rare birds and animals,” she explains.

Rebuild or Restore?

This new forest is a rare positive development in an otherwise tragic situation, considering an estimated 298,000 hectares (1,150 square miles) of forest fires — 50 times more than the annual average — have been reported across Ukraine since the start of the since 2022, according to the by the Kyiv School of Economics. The report, which took stock of Ukraine’s economic losses as of this past January, calculated forest damages “at more than 82.9 million cubic meters of timber with an estimated value of $4.5 billion.”

As a result, many Ukrainian environmentalists and scientists have appealed to the government to withhold any reconstruction of the dam.

“When the dam was first built [during the Soviet era], the damage to the regional ecology, culture and heritage were not taken into consideration,” says Vasyliuk. “As a result, so much of the natural and historical significant biodiversity was impacted, such as the Great Meadows,” referring to the historic steppe terrain of Ukraine that was submerged under the reservoir when the dam was built.

In the early 1950s the Soviet Union pushed for widespread industrialization. During this period, this region and many others were razed to make way for infrastructure such as the dam.

“The dam increased the salinity of the land, affecting soil quality, and that should be one of the reasons to not rebuild it,” Vasyliuk argues. “We need to plan strategically for the future and make decisions that are good for Ukrainian and not just because the dam was already there and someone gave us money to rebuild it.”

Toll on Scientific Study

Overall, though, scientific research in the region has been severely restricted since the Russian invasion.

“From what we can gather, about 30% of the previously protected areas, such as wetlands and Ramsay sites in Ukraine, are now active warzones or occupied territories,” says Drapaliuk, who presented findings on that damage last year in a webinar for the EUROPARC Foundation. The Dnipro delta, the mouth of the Dnieper River, is included in the Ramsar Convention’s list of protected areas of international importance.

According data published this past February by the Ukrainian Ministry of Environmental Protection, about 812 protected areas, spread over 1 million square kilometers, have been affected by different types of military operations since the beginning of the war.

“So much of the area has been mined (with explosive land mines) that it becomes dangerous to even study the region even after it is liberated,” Drapaliuk says, adding that lack of resources, financial and human, has considerably slowed down data collection.

“The damage by the war has put a lot of pressure on our work,” she adds. “For those working in the national parks, it is difficult to even access basic needs such as vehicles, fuel, electricity and equipment since much of it was destroyed during the Russian attacks.”

Then there’s the effect on people. “To care about a forest, you have to care about people who work for it,” Drapaliuk says. But persistent Russian bombing of the region has prevented any normalcy in the work and life of the locals. “A lot of people from this area, a lot of forest rangers, are now in the army, making it difficult to continue work on protection and conservation.”

Indeed, the war has blurred the lines of duty for those like Skoryk, who went from being an environmentalist to a combatant to a prisoner of war. Just days after the invasion began in February 2022, Skoryk was taken prisoner by Russian forces who had entered Ukraine. He eventually escaped when his captors “got drunk on too much vodka.” He went on to assist with the liberation of the national park.

Photo courtesy Serhiiy Skoryk.

Drapaliuk urges international environmental groups to invest in preserving Ukraine’s biodiversity. Much of the aid flowing into Ukraine today is for military support, and issues such as ecological destruction tends to take a backseat.

“Of course, we all understand the priority and urgency; our country needs military support,” she says. “But in my opinion, we also really need international help to protect the ecological sector.”

Skoryk calls attention to demining efforts in the region, a task to which he is personally devoting his time.

“Gradually, we are clearing the area of mine and explosives, but it is a vast land mass encompassing nearly 12,000 hectares, and complex undertaking,” he says.

Experts also emphasized the need to build policies and plans, not just for wartime but also to be implemented after victory.

“There is a lot we can’t do now [in terms of conservation] but we can prepare an action plan for territories under war or occupation. They can be established as new protected areas so that we are ready to save the biodiversity in those territories soon after liberation,” Drapaliuk says.

“We can’t afford to waste time,” she adds.

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Previously in The Revelator:

War Threatens Ukraine’s Unique Red Seaweed Fields. Here’s How Scientists Monitor Them From Afar

20 Books to Help Prepare for Trump 2.0

Whether they’re primers on environmental activism or a series on resisting autocrats, these books offer a chance to study up for the bumpy years ahead.

Life throws us curveballs, and we adapt.

For instance, I never meant to read so many books on authoritarianism, but that’s just the way things have gone.

With the Trump 2.0 administration poised to take office in short order, maybe it’s time for everyone to read more about autocracies — how they rise, how they affect the environment, and (of course) how to fight and stand up to them.

Here are 20 books, including some primers on environmental activism, to help provide a roadmap for the days ahead. As always the link for each book goes to its publisher’s site; you should also be able to find many of these books through your local library or bookseller. Just try to read them before the next wave of book bans…

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder — A compact but essential book that got many of us through the first Trump administration. Still painfully relevant.

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum — Follow the money. It’s the key to understanding what motivates the current crop of kleptocrats, even more than traditional power and megalomania.

Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations With Local Leaders Solving Global Problems by Anthony Flint — We won’t see much federal action to combat climate change and other crises anytime soon, but you can expect local action to continue (and perhaps become even more important). Books like this help share effective local success stories so they can be replicated elsewhere. Once they’re effective in enough places, it’s hard to argue that they don’t deserve to go even wider.

Project 2025 — Let’s be clear: This isn’t an endorsement. This book is the Necronomicon of the 21st century — a dark tome designed to tear down the administrative state and sow chaos for millions of people. The Trump campaign swore this wasn’t its policy manual, but let’s see how many of the authors join the new administration and what they get up to in the months ahead. Meanwhile this blueprint for right-wing destruction — which says the quiet parts out loud — offers critical insight on where we need to build our opposition and resistance.

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat — Published in 2021, this book has already helped to define the modern conversation about authoritarianism and will continue to do so.

On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy by Lee McIntyre — If you think disinformation is gone until the next election cycle, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators by Jacob Heilbrunn — Why do so many U.S. leaders swoon over autocrats? This book offers important lessons. It’s not a new trend, so understanding the historic roots could help us in the future.

The “Defending American Democracy” series by Richard L. Abel — Three books (soon to be joined by a fourth), all bearing the subhead “Resistance to Trump and Trumpism.”  They’re a bit on the pricey side, and perhaps more academic than many readers need, but they present a powerful portrait and critical understanding of today’s strongmen in general and Trump in particular. They may also offer strategies for turning the tide.

Youth to Power

Youth to Power: Your Voice and How to Use It by Jamie Margolin — An essential book for young activists. It’s a couple of years old now, but it can still help to motivate the next generation.

Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen — A powerful book by one of journalism’s best. Gessen links what they saw in their home country of Russia with what’s been happening in the United States. Again, this is a few years old, but it’s vital history.

Patriot: A Memoir by Alexei Navalny — The Russian activist was willing to die for his homeland. His memoir, written in the prison where he would later die, offers lessons to help the rest of us live.

Climate of Contempt: How to Rescue the U.S. Energy Transition From Voter Partisanship by David Spence — Something to study before the next election. Assuming we get to have one.

Earth’s Emergency Room: Saving Species as the Planet and Politics Get Hotter by Lowell E. Baier — A testament to the Endangered Species Act intended to generate bipartisan support for conservation. Here’s hoping it’s not too late.

On Freedom by Timothy Snyder — This powerful and insightful follow-up to On Tyranny offers a new way of looking at human needs and government.

Presence Activism: A Profound Antidote to Climate Anxiety by Lynne Sedgmore — The best thing to do when you’re feeling overwhelmed by the climate crisis (or Trump 2.0) is to do anything. Taking action improves mental wellbeing, and acting collectively makes a huge difference. We’ll need to keep our anxiety and dread at bay the next few years; helping the planet and other people is one way to accomplish that, while doing some good in the process.

Preventing the Greenlash: How to Overcome Opposition to Green Policies by Lorenzo Forni — We’re going to get a lot of resistance to environmental regulation in the next few years. This book may offer a model for overcoming some of that. (Available Dec. 3.)

Engage Connect Protect

Engage, Connect, Protect: Empowering Diverse Youth as Environmental Leaders by Angelou Ezeilo — The founder of the Greening Youth Foundation provides a toolkit for engaging younger participants from African American, Latino and Native American communities. We’re going to need them.

Turf War: How a Band of Activists Saved New York From Donald Trump’s “Masterpiece” by Steven Robinson — See, he can be beaten!

Of course we could add many other books about activism, democracy, compassion, or environmental science to this list. Share your recommendations here and we’ll add them below. Here’s what readers have already suggested:

That’s it for this month, but you can find hundreds of additional environmental book recommendations, including dozens of books on activism, in the “Revelator Reads” archives.

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Election Day Sucked. Today Is What Matters.

Damage is coming soon, but we can strengthen ourselves now.

I woke up an hour early on Wednesday morning, checked the news on my phone, and got punched in the face.

Then I put the teakettle on, walked the dogs in the fog, came home to a brilliant sunrise, and got to work.

By the time you read this an endless stream of pundits, journalists, and other experts will have analyzed the 2024 election and Trump’s pending return to power. I’ve already read and watched more than my share of them. Dark days are coming; that much is all but certain.

But those days aren’t here yet. The things we fear are months in the future — if many of them happen at all. Because the people who will resist Trump 2.0 are already planning, (re)building, and getting ready to do what they need to do.

Of course, that’s also in the future. That’s not today.

Today is all we have for certain on this planet. Today is about living, enjoying that sunrise, getting in touch with your community and coalitions, and reminding yourself of what gets you out of bed in the morning. It’s about the species you love, the wild spaces you treasure, the causes you advocate for, and for the cultures that give us strength.

I know we all have worries about what happens after Jan. 20, 2025. But we can’t let those worries and fears consume us now. The late Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh said it well: “The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.”

Today reminds you what’s worth saving and gives us the strength for tomorrow.

So let’s talk about today. What are you doing to build your strength and resilience? Send your thoughts; we’ll compile and share some of your answers with Revelator readers. (Me, I’m taking walks, talking with friends, watching nearby wildlife, reading, and filling my sketchbook.)

But let’s also talk about the past. Trump 1.0 and other right-wing governments (local or national) caused a lot of environmental damage. How did you, your organizations and coalitions, or your community resist — or recover? Let us know briefly or write a more in-depth op-ed or essay to help others in the fights to come.

And yes, let’s talk about the future. What environmental threats (federal or local) do you worry about, or what are you doing now to prepare for potential upcoming developments? Share your plans to help others with the same or similar fears or goals.

Past, present, or future: We want to hear from you.

And you can write to us today or in a few weeks; we’re not going anywhere.

Speaking of which, we have a half-dozen great articles and commentaries ready to publish and dozens more coming down the pike. We’ll start publishing those in the days ahead. Because Trump 2.0 is just the latest threat — there are lots of other ongoing problems (and solutions) for us all to understand and act upon. Today and every day.

Here are a few other worthwhile pick-me-ups:

“The Resistance Starts Now” — Robert Reich

“Jon Stewart’s Election Night Takeaway” — The Daily Show

“Trump Presidency Will Face Unprecedented Resistance” — Center for Biological Diversity (our publisher)

“The Morning After” — Legal Planet

“They want you to feel powerless and surrender…” — thread by Rebecca Solnit

“Now What?” — Dan Rather

“Small, Medium, and Large Things to Do Today” — Legal Planet

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