Indeed, the computational literature is now hopelessly replete with competing methods that quantify some form of similarity in neural population codes. One cluster of methods frames the problem through the lens of geometry, asking whether two systems arrange their responses in the same shape. This includes the framework of representational similarity analysis (RSA), as well as linear centered kernel alignment (CKA), which has become the de facto standard in the machine-learning research community. Others favor prediction, gauging similarity by how well the activity of one system can be used to predict that of the other. This perspective is prevalent in initiatives, such as Brain-Score, that use regularized linear regression performance as a metric of similarity. Some approaches, such as Procrustes shape distance, combine elements of both geometric similarity and prediction.

The summary above is highly incomplete—a recent review of the literature documented well over 30 methods in use. This proliferation of approaches gives us a deep well to draw from, but it also represents a serious concern. Many neuroscience practitioners—even those with computational and mathematical backgrounds—simply do not have the time to sift through this complex literature and understand its nuances. A skeptic may even feel that we are overcomplicating the problem.

A large, peer-reviewed study published Friday in JAMA Network Open found that transgender youths prescribed puberty blockers had significantly lower adjusted odds of diagnosed mood disorders and suicidal thoughts and behaviors than transgender youths who did not receive the medications, adding new evidence to one of the most politically contentious areas of pediatric medicine.

The nationwide retrospective cohort study examined insurance claims data from more than 231,000 youths between 2016 and 2025, comparing transgender and cisgender youths who either did or did not receive puberty blockers.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/scientificarticles/p/1359566/more-than-half-of-adults-in-u-s-say-they-lack-basic-statistical-understanding

Study: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/gnc-workplace-discrim/

Gender-nonconforming cisgender lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer employees were also more likely to be out at work. About two-thirds [68 percent] said they were out as lesbian, gay, bisexual or queer to their supervisor, compared with 50 percent of gender-conforming employees.

A bit of a return to the original intent for this community. The audience of this article is intended for policymakers, and the emphasis is mine because I felt that was the core point.

When should we trust the evidence and the experts who interpret it for us?

A new study makes headlines. It shows a diet works, a supplement sharpens memory, a teaching method transforms reading scores or a management practice improves team productivity. So we adjust how we eat, parent or work. We follow the science.

A few months later, another headline overturns the first. Eggs were bad for us, then good again. Red wine protects your heart, or does it? Dark chocolate, low-fat diets, standing desks, masks during a pandemic: Recommendations based on the science keep changing. Eventually, people stop trusting what “studies show.”

But that is how science works: Evidence accumulates; early results get tested and some hold up, others don’t. The problem is that we report and act on evolving evidence as if it is final.

In a new article, I argue that this tendency to treat preliminary results as if they were conclusive leads to overconfident policy claims and contributes to the declining trust in science. I offer a new framework to help policymakers classify evidence maturity.

The insights can guide all of us to interpret scientific evidence in our daily lives.

Sources

• https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.aef3128
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02461-1
• https://theconversation.com/rain-may-have-helped-form-the-first-cells-kick-starting-life-as-we-know-it-238291
• https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aed8749

The health of LGBTQ+ people has long been an indicator of wider advances in human rights and health equity. Modern LGBTQ+ liberation movements have achieved substantial progress towards the decriminalisation and depathologisation of LGBTQ+ identities. Yet hard-won gains are easily lost, and many parts of the world see no such gains at all, with LGBTQ+ people denied even the most basic human rights.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9090277

Banner image: The short-eared dog inhabits the Amazon and prefers untouched forests. Image courtesy of Guido Ayala & María Viscarra/WCS Bolivia.

Study gathers over 4,000 photos to find Bolivia’s rarest Amazonian dog

• A study conducted for more than 20 years with camera-trap surveys in different parts of the Bolivian Amazon has recorded 594 independent events for the short-eared dog in more than 4,600 images.
• This species, popularly known in Bolivia as the ghost dog, is one of the least-known canids in the world. Its survival depends highly on the quality of its natural habitat, according to experts.
• In the Bolivian forests, it can generally be found in protected areas or Indigenous territories, which scientists say underscores the importance of these kinds of areas for biodiversity conservation.

It has a fox-like snout, webbed toes and a thick tail. It’s called the short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis), but also the ghost dog (perro fantasma in Spanish) in Bolivia, and the Amazonian dog. It’s one of the world’s least-known canids and one of the least frequently sighted carnivores in Latin America.

Now, though, a study conducted over the course of more than two decades — from 2001 to 2024 — in Bolivia has revealed more than 4,600 camera-trap images that show how it lives, the places it inhabits, and why this species is so dependent on South America’s forests remaining intact to survive.

The research underscores that the ghost dog is very much an Amazonian species, and in particular a forest one. In Bolivia, it can be spotted in the country’s continuous Amazonian forests, in the northern portion of the department of La Paz, but also in the department of Pando, in northern and northeastern Beni, and in the far north and northeast of Santa Cruz.

It’s also found in the pre-Amazonian forests of the Andes mountain range, also called piedmont forests, at elevations up to 750 meters (2,460 feet).

Robert Wallace, a British biologist from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Bolivia and a co-author of the new study, said the team conducted a systematic review of published and unpublished distribution records of the species in Bolivia. Throughout the 23 years, they also carried out 34 intensive camera-trap surveys in the lowland areas of the Greater Madidi-Tambopata Landscape (in northwest Bolivia) and the Llanos de Moxos Biocultural Landscape (northern Bolivia).

Popularly called the “ghost dog” (perro fantasma) in Bolivia, Atelocynus microtis is one of the world’s least-known canid species. Image courtesy of Guido Ayala & María Viscarra/WCS Bolivia.

Wallace said the short-eared dog is native to the Amazonian forests, not the Amazonian grasslands. “Our [collected] data shows that what it seeks the most is the forest itself, as it avoids transitional habitats leading to more open areas. It is a forest species,” he said.

He added that the use of hidden technology, such as camera traps, makes the mysterious dog not as hard to find as people think. Even so, Wallace said, it’s still challenging to witness the species directly: this canid is quite skittish and has a highly developed sense of smell, which allows it to avoid encounters with humans and natural predators.

video from a camera trap

“The short-eared dog is primarily diurnal, but also crepuscular, meaning it’s quite active around dawn and dusk. It can be active at night, but the vast majority of camera-trap sightings occurred during the day,” Wallace said.

He added the species’ preferred biome type is the lowland forest, “not right next to the river, but in the mature forest, further inland.”

A two-decade-long initiative

The study was backed by WCS Bolivia and included a lot of camera trapping, done every year during the dry season.

This method revealed an animal with a relatively low-slung body, short legs, small and rounded ears, a large head, and dense, dark fur ranging from blackish-gray to reddish-brown, with a dark dorsal stripe and a long bushy tail that usually drags on the ground. Its feet are partially webbed, meaning the toes are connected by a membrane — a unique trait among Amazonian canids.

The camera-trap surveys yielded a combined 4,635 photos covering 594 separate events featuring the short-eared dog.

“Camera-trap surveys provided significant information on the behavior and relative abundance of the short-eared dog, suggesting that it is more abundant than previously believed, although it remains a relatively rare medium-sized carnivore,” Wallace said.

He said it’s encouraging that the short-eared dog’s relative abundance was higher in protected areas and Indigenous territories that overlap with protected areas, emphasizing that this reinforces the importance of these kinds of areas for biodiversity conservation.

A short-eared dog approaches a veterinarian in the Bolivian Amazon. Image courtesy of Renata Leite Pitman.

“These results have important implications for conservation, as they suggest that large tracts of continuous forest, comparable in size to larger protected areas, will be necessary to uphold viable long-term populations of short-eared dogs,” Wallace said.

According to the Bolivian environmental NGO ORÉ, six species of canids are known in Bolivia, including the short-eared dog, also known in the Amazon lowlands as the bush dog (perro de monte in Spanish). ORÉ noted that the species shouldn’t be confused with the more common bush dog ( Speothos venaticus ) or the black-footed fox (Cerdocyon thous).

ORÉ collaborated on a 2024 related study with the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum, located in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the largest city in Bolivia. The organization told Mongabay that the short-eared dog is the only species in its genus and is a solitary carnivore. It measures 70-100 centimeters (28-39 inches) in length, stands 35 cm (14 in) tall, and has a bushy black tail — except at the base — that’s long enough to touch the ground.

The short-eared dog’s survival depends on forest quality. Image courtesy of Renata Leite Pitman.

The short-eared dog’s characteristics

The dog’s head is large and more brownish than its grayish back. Its snout has a distinct black line running from the nose to the area below the eyes. The ears are small, hence the name, but emerge above the crown of the head. They’re rounded and light brown, contrasting with the head’s tone. The dog can weigh between 9 and 10 kilograms (20-22 pounds), with the females up to 30% larger than the males. The species’ diet is believed to consist of amphibians, fish and reptiles, although it also eats fruit.

Marco Greminger, a veterinary zootechnician and professor at the Autonomous University of Beni in Bolivia, told Mongabay that a ghost dog was once captured alive near the university. He said the animal was found hidden in a disused ground-level air duct.

“It was incredible how we managed to capture that ghost dog alive. They called me to help, and I did it. The [short-eared] dog came into the kennel; it was really weak. I remember giving him 350 grams [12 ounces] of chicken liver — which is rich in folic acid — chicken feet, and an oral rehydration solution. He ate all 10 pieces I gave him,” Greminger said.

He added the animal has a strong odor. “It’s stronger than that of a porcupine or a fox; it’s more sour,” he said.

The short-eared dog prefers upland forests, living far from the riverside. Image courtesy of Renata Leite Pitman.

Veterinarian and ecologist Renata Leite Pitman, a researcher at Duke University in the U.S., has studied short-eared dogs for 14 years, calling them “very elusive and hard to spot.” In that time, she’s located just five of them in the wild, in the Amazon Basin, her place of fieldwork, and fitted them with tracking collars to study their habits. “They are very shy, totally different from pets,” she said.

In 2023, Pitman was contacted by Greminger, who was seeking advice after finding the dog in the air duct. “I shared what I had been feeding it. We agreed and coordinated a few steps. She recommended papaya; I had been giving guava,” Greminger said.

This story was first published here in Spanish on May 6, 2026.

The star passes very close to the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole and could reveal the black hole’s spin by tracking how it warps the star’s orbit.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9090168

370 billion crickets are farmed for food every year. Scientists have discovered they may feel pain

House Cricket (Acheta domesticus). Credit: mani_raab/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC

You're cooking dinner, distracted, and your hand brushes a hot pan. Nerve signals race to your spinal cord and back to yank your arm away in a fraction of a second, with no thought required.

Then comes the pain. A sharp, spreading sting gives way to a pulsing ache, and you cradle your hand and run it under cold water until it subsides. That felt experience is distinct from the reflex that preceded it. While the reflex moved your body out of danger, pain drives you to protect the wound, recover, and learn to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

We readily accept that other people feel pain by reading cues in their behavior, like the inspection and nursing of an injury. We extend this to some animals too—a dog licking its paw or a cat favoring a limb rightly stir our sympathies. But what happens when we turn that lens on animals far less like us?

In our new study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, we searched for behavioral signs of pain in house crickets, one of the most widely farmed insects. After applying heat to an antenna, we found that crickets didn't just reflexively flinch and recover. They nursed the harm, returning again and again to groom the affected site, much as we rub a burned hand.

The frontiers of feeling

French philosopher René Descartes considered animals unfeeling biological machines, and for centuries the circle of moral concern barely extended beyond our own species.

But the boundaries have steadily crept outward. Recognition that mammals experience pain came first, followed by birds. Fish too, once assumed to lack the necessary brain structures, are now widely accepted as capable of pain-like states.

The leap into invertebrates has been greater and more contentious. Their nervous systems bear little resemblance to our own, so arguments from brain anatomy alone don't carry us far. Instead, we look to behavior. Does the animal respond to harm in ways that go beyond reflex, ways that are flexible, persistent, and sensitive to context?

Over the past decade, testable indicators for pain in non-humans have been developed and are increasingly accepted. These include learning from unpleasant events, trading off harms against rewards, and actively protecting the site of injury. Evidence meeting these criteria helped crabs and lobsters gain legal recognition as sentient under United Kingdom law in 2022.

Among insects, the evidence has been accumulating fast. Yet most of this evidence comes from bees. Bumblebees weigh the risk of harm against the richness of a food reward, and groom the site of an injury. Honeybees learn to associate particular smells with harmful stimuli and avoid them.

Far less attention has been paid to Orthoptera, the group that includes grasshoppers, locusts and crickets. That gap matters, because the house cricket (Acheta domesticus) is the world's most widely farmed insect, with more than 370 billion reared annually.

Do crickets feel pain?

We tested 40 male and 40 female crickets, each experiencing three conditions in random order: a hot probe to a single antenna (65°C, to activate damage receptors but not cause lasting injury), the same probe unheated, or no contact at all.

We filmed their behavior for ten minutes. Observers scoring the footage did not know which treatment any animal had received.

The results were clear. After the hot probe, crickets were more than twice as likely to groom the affected antenna compared to controls, and spent roughly four times longer doing so.

Could this simply reflect general disturbance rather than targeted care? Unlikely: grooming was directed specifically at the heated side, not spread evenly across both antennae as it was after gentle touch or no contact.

And the behavior wasn't a brief, reflexive reaction. It was elevated from the outset and tapered gradually over minutes, much like rubbing a burned hand as the felt sting slowly fades.

Small minds, big feelings

Subjective experience cannot be directly observed in any animal, not even humans.

But we have shown crickets respond to harm in a way that satisfies a key criterion many scientists and philosophers use to infer pain: flexible, directed self-protection. Combined with the knowledge that crickets possess damage receptors, can learn to avoid harms, and respond less to injury under morphine, the weight of evidence for an inner life is growing.

The practical stakes are real. Hundreds of billions of farmed insects are slaughtered each year by freezing, boiling and baking. Pesticides kill trillions more, optimized for lethality with no consideration of potential suffering.

If we take a precautionary approach, credible evidence of suffering should motivate proportionate protections well before we are certain.

Insects have been around for more than 400 million years and are far more behaviorally and cognitively sophisticated than once assumed. The question, then, may not be whether some insects feel, but why we ever assumed they couldn't.

China’s solar power rollout is harming birds, a new analysis finds Mary Randolph 5–6 minutes

August 20, 2026

2 min read

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China’s solar domination could have unintended ecological harms

A new study finds that China’s solar energy boom is hurting bird diversity

By Mary Randolph edited by Claire Cameron Solar panels with the sunset behind them

A new analysis studied the solar policies and bird diversity in more than 2300 counties across China.

Contributor via Getty Images

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China is the world leader in solar power, but the country’s massive boom in this clean energy source could have unintended consequences for the country’s birds.

Using birdwatching and policy data from more than 2,300 counties across China, a new analysis found that areas with stricter policies enforcing solar energy development have seen decreases in bird diversity over the last 10 years. The study adds to a body of evidence showing the negative impact of industrial development and habitat loss on birds.

“Our results situate solar expansion within the broader, already well-established set of anthropogenic pressures on birds, including habitat loss, agricultural intensification, climate change and land use conversion,” says Huiming Zhang, an associate professor at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in China and lead author on the study.

Constructing solar power plants can affect the vegetation and landscape around them—including the creatures that live there. Curiously, the researchers found that even in areas where planners had attempted to plant new vegetation in the wake of a solar farm being built, it didn’t mitigate bird diversity loss—a result of what the researchers call “inferior greening.”

The analysis, which published today in Science, will hopefully help to “reconcile energy and conservation goals” in China and elsewhere in the world, Zhang says.

“The lesson is not to slow the energy transition. It is to steer large solar projects toward locations with lower ecological conflict, subject to assessment of each site, and to build biodiversity safeguards into projects from the start.”

The study has its limitations. Ken Rosenberg, a conservation scientist at Cornell University who was not involved in the research, says bird diversity measures can be misleading, as they can obscure how well a specific local bird population is actually doing. Future research might look at bird population numbers instead, he says.

That said, the analysis is the first he has seen that has looked at the relationship between solar policy and biodiversity on a national level. “You don’t want to trade one crisis for another,” Rosenberg says.

“If you’re only looking at energy policy and renewable energy, you could set up these policies and make these decisions without realizing that you’re doing more harm than good in other aspects of the environment. Biodiversity often takes a backseat.”

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9061310

Banner image: An Australian flatback sea turtle (Natator depressus). Image by © Dylan Goldspink via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Karajarri celebrate Australia’s first ‘Sea Country’ Indigenous Protected Area

• The Kimberley region of northwestern Australia is a biodiversity hotspot and ancestral home of the Karajarri people, who recently dedicated Karajarri Jurarr Ngurra, Australia’s first “Sea Country” Indigenous Protected Area (IPA), covering around 237,000 hectares (587,000 acres) of marine and coastal ecosystems.
• Proponents of IPAs say they can empower Indigenous Australians as decision-makers in land management, combining traditional ecological knowledge with conservation goals.
• IPAs now account for 54% of Australia’s progress toward protecting 30% of its territory by 2030.
• While research shows every $1 invested in IPAs yields up to $3.40 in social, economic and environmental returns, advocates stress that Indigenous communities still need meaningful, sustained support.

In northwestern Australia lies a remote and wildly diverse region called the Kimberley. There, the iron-red soils of the Pindan Country connect forests and the Great Sandy Desert, all bracketed by a vast stretch of Indian Ocean coastline. Its springs and wetlands host migratory birds. Offshore, sawfish, as visually striking as they are rare, ply the waters just beyond the unbroken Eighty Mile Beach, itself a nesting site for the little-known flatback turtle (Natator depressus).

The Kimberley has also long been a home to humans, as rock art more than 17,000 years old attests, and among the heirs of that legacy are the Karajarri people. Over the past 30 years, the Karajarri secured legal recognition of their claims to the land, later establishing an Indigenous Protected Area (IPA), Karajarri Pirra Ngurra, that now covers an area of land nearly the size of Rwanda in the state of Western Australia. They also developed a ranger program that draws on long-held cultural knowledge of the landscape.

In March 2026, the Karajarri people dedicated Karajarri Jurarr Ngurra, Australia’s first “Sea Country” IPA, comprising 237,489 hectares (nearly 587,000 acres) of marine and coastal ecosystems. It includes part of Malumpurr, the Karajarri word for Eighty Mile Beach. The IPA “strengthens long‑standing efforts by Karajarri Traditional Owners and Karajarri Rangers to protect the region’s biodiversity and keep Country healthy,” Malarndirri McCarthy, Australia’s minister for Indigenous Australians, said in a March 20 government statement about the Karajarri Sea Country IPA dedication.

The aim of the Karajarri IPAs is to support a mutually beneficial relationship between the land and its longtime stewards, says Jesse Ala’i, former Land and Sea Country manager for the Karajarri Traditional Lands Association.

“In order to have healthy Country, you need healthy people,” Ala’i says. Likewise, he adds, “Healthy people need healthy Country.”

Gwion Gwion rock paintings in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Image by TimJN1/Bradshaw Art via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Across Australia, more than 90 IPAs dot the land. And the government recently allocated A$13 million ($9.4 million) in initial funding to add new ones. The IPAs are a critical piece of Australia’s strategy to protect 30% of the country’s territory by 2030, part of the global 30×30 goal aimed at halting biodiversity loss.

“We’re well underway to reaching that target and IPAs are providing more than half of that contribution,” Murray Watt, Australia’s environment minister, said in the government’s statement.

To date, Australia has protected nearly a quarter of its land and oceans, a spokesperson for the environment ministry told Mongabay. According to the Indigenous-governed nonprofit Country Needs People, IPAs account for 54% of that goal. But the organization’s CEO, Paddy O’Leary, says the role of Australia’s extensive IPA network goes beyond meeting those goals.

“The magic sauce in an IPA comes from creating a model that, done well, will put Traditional Owners in a much more proactive position in terms of managing their Country,” O’Leary says.

The relationship between Indigenous Australians and the land they live on is well known, he adds. “It’s historical fact and a truth.

“There’s so many advantages to making that connection more recognized, more seen and more respected,” O’Leary says.

Flatback turtles nest on, and live off, the coast of Malumpurr, also known as Eighty Mile Beach. Image by © glyall via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Self-determination and conservation

From the government’s perspective, IPAs are part of the conservation puzzle for protecting the continent’s ecosystems, including those underrepresented in the country’s National Reserve System, O’Leary says. But the designation of an IPA is more than that for Australia’s Indigenous peoples, including Aboriginal groups like the Karajarri as well as distinct peoples from the Torres Strait off the country’s northern coast, he adds.

“It’s a stamp that puts a distinctive Indigenous view on how a given area should be managed,” O’Leary says. “It centers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as not just participants or people to be consulted, but decision-makers and key drivers of the management.”

The IPA tag also provides a pathway for these groups to collaborate with outsiders, he adds. “It makes visible to other stakeholders who might want to collaborate the set of priorities that local Traditional Owners want, and it combines both biodiversity and cultural values in management as well as a governance framework that is built — in a good IPA, should be built — from the ground up by the Indigenous community.”

But building that foundation takes significant time and resources, O’Leary says. This year’s federal funding is intended to be a “catalyst,” to be augmented by grants from supportive NGOs or state governments.

“[It’s] not a huge amount of money, but for small groups, it’s often a very useful amount,” he says.

A map shows the locations of Australia’s Indigenous Protected Areas and Key Biodiversity Areas. Image by Mongabay.

Role of the rangers

For the Karajarri people, the journey to their own IPA started in the mid-1990s, when a group of elders applied for “Native Title” rights. About a decade later, after government recognition, the Karajarri started their ranger program and began the consultation process for an official IPA. In 2014, the Karajarri people declared their IPA, covering almost 2.5 million hectares (6.1 million acres) of land in the Kimberley. Sustainable resource use is allowed over the vast majority of the land, while part is managed with the same protections as a national park.

The state of Western Australia supports the Karajarri Ranger program, which serves as a fundamental cog in the functioning of an IPA and a source of employment for communities, Ala’i says.

“It’s impossible to separate Indigenous ranger programs from IPAs,” he adds. Ala’i is not Karajarri; instead, he came to his work on the IPA from a background in conservation biology.

“When I heard about ranger programs, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s the thing,’” he tells Mongabay. “It’s that intersection for me of the environment and social community development, capacity building [and] mentoring.”

Matilda Murley, a marine invertebrate ecologist and research associate at the University of Western Australia, has spent nearly a decade collaborating with the Karajarri people, working with the rangers on a Karajarri-led project to monitor their shoreline ecosystem in ways that make sense for both their culture and biodiversity.

“They are the cultural custodians being paid to look after Country,” says Murley, who is not Karajarri. “They’re looking out for the community priorities.”

For Western science, the Kimberley coast has largely been a blank spot on the map, with few details about what exists there. But as Murley’s project developed through systematic data collection, as well as workshops and interviews in the Karajarri community, it became clear how much knowledge had been passed down over generations.

“They are the main scientists,” she said of the Karajarri people. “They have this amazing historical knowledge of how things have changed.”

That knowledge and working with these types of projects can be springboards for both the community and individuals, Murley says. “We’re upskilling the rangers.”

Ala’i notes that scientists have learned that a collaborative approach leads to far more successful projects, and it’s benefiting Indigenous communities in Australia, who struggle with much higher rates of poor health and poverty than the broader population. The Karajarri Rangers have co-authored scientific publications with Murley and were also part of a team to report the first adult female dwarf sawfish (Pristis clavata) ever recorded by Western science.

“We’ve got rangers that have gone off to university now,” Ala’i says.

Government agencies, too, are beginning to catch on to the power of thousands of years of experience in the landscape, particularly when it comes to fire, he adds. “You need to turn to Indigenous fire regimes if you want to deal with fire in a changing climate.”

The springs and wetlands of Pindan Country host migratory birds. Image by Robert Clemens via Unsplash (Public domain).

Malumpurr, or Eighty Mile Beach, in the Kimberley region. Image by Wendy Tempels via Unsplash (Public domain).

The Karajarri Rangers have co-authored scientific publications with ecologist Matilda Murley and were also part of a team to report the first adult female dwarf sawfish ever recorded by Western science. Image by David Morgan via IUCN Shark Specialist Group.

Rock art more than 17,000 years old in the Kimberley region. Image courtesy of Caroline Jones via Flickr (Public domain).

Costs of conservation

Globally, embracing Indigenous-led conservation is increasingly seen as an efficient path for confronting biodiversity loss, climate change and other environmental woes. Research published in 2016 tracked the impact of government and “third-party” funding on five IPAs across Australia. The authors found that every $1 invested in the IPAs and their ranger programs netted between $1.50 and $3.40 in “social, economic, cultural and environmental outcomes.”

At the same time, the Australian government provides billions of dollars to the fossil fuel industry, as well as biodiversity-damaging practices in agriculture, fisheries and forestry, according to a recent study. Around the world, governments spend some $500 billion annually on “harmful subsidies,” which the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calls for reforming by 2030.

Ala’i notes that, however cost-effective IPAs might be, the communities still need meaningful support and shouldn’t be seen simply as a less expensive solution. Still, he says, “I still think it’s fundamentally the best system the government’s ever created” to address conservation and socioeconomic problems.

“It’s very self-determined, if allowed to be, which is what all the research shows is the best way to allow Indigenous people to close those inequalities,” Ala’i adds. “It just hits all the boxes.”

O’Leary of Country Needs People acknowledges the system isn’t perfect, and says successful IPAs rely on careful planning, support and engagement. But, he says, they represent a critical tool that’s being used right now.

“Yes, there are a lot of things to be improved,” he adds. “But this is happening on the ground now in real time. It’s not being theorized in academic papers or in international forums alone. It’s actually happening on the ground for people, and that is where the rubber hits the road.”

John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.

This social behavior might reveal the evolutionary roots of traits that underlie pet-keeping in humans, scientists say, from caregiving to tolerance and curiosity. But it’s not the same as a person keeping a cat or a dog

Carlyn Kranking | Associate Web Editor, Science

August 18, 2026 4:22 p.m.

When a mouse wandered into the white-cheeked gibbons’ enclosure at the Shanghai Zoo, the monkeys didn’t try to eat it—or even chase it away. One female primate scooped up the rodent and gently held and caressed it. University of Oxford evolutionary biologist Cyril Grueter watched the interaction, and he was mystified.

“I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at,” he wrote in an article for the Conversation. “The gibbon treated the tiny rodent with remarkable gentleness. I couldn’t stop wondering why.”

Working with an international group of researchers, Grueter then uncovered more examples of primates interacting closely with other species. A young male bonobo carefully cradled a mongoose pup. Some monkeys climbed onto the backs of pigs; others mounted deer. A tufted gray langur stroked a squirrel. A group of stump-tailed macaques worked together to groom a stray dog.

In all, the team tallied 427 cases from scientific papers, media reports and a global survey of 37 primatologists. The interactions, most of which included play or grooming, occurred both in the wild and in captivity. They involved 88 primate species interacting with 127 different species, some of which were also primates. The researchers published the findings in July in the journal Primates.

The compilation reveals that “this is quite a common behavior,” Grueter tells New Scientist’s Michael Marshall. The new work is only a first step, but it’s starting to fill a void on the subject in the mainstream scientific literature, he adds. “We’re hoping that this study is also a wake-up call for primatologists, or zoologists more generally, to look for similar behaviors in both the wild and in captivity.”

One of Grueter’s favorite encounters occurs in Japan, where macaques have been regularly seen grooming and riding on the backs of sika deer. “It starts with something mundane: Macaques feeding in trees drop fruit and leaves that deer eat, and deer also consume macaque feces around sleeping sites,” Cédric Sueur, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Strasbourg in France, tells Smithsonian magazine. But it doesn’t stop there: “Macaques groom deer and eat their parasites, play with them and ride them.” They even try to mate with the deer, a behavior that might be spread through social transmission among the primates.

Sueur has published studies on the macaques and deer, but he was not involved in the new research. With the team’s assembled anecdotes, he says, “scattered curiosities become a data set one can interrogate.” But he emphasizes that the observations were not a designed experiment. “The numbers describe where scientists and cameras have been, not how often these behaviors occur,” Sueur says.

CW - animal death

spoiler

Not all interactions documented by the team seemed friendly. Twenty-six of the incidents were deemed “abusive,” though these ranged widely. In one case, a male baboon in Saudi Arabia seemed to have “kidnapped” a domestic puppy, per the paper, and carried it around for long periods. The researchers identified 13 instances where the other animal died from violent handling, including birds, pangolins, primates and a domestic cat. These cases did not necessarily stem from ill will or aggression on the part of the primates—some might have simply been botched attempts at caring for the other creature.

Patterns emerged in how the primates interacted with other species based on their age and sex. Juvenile primates were more likely to engage in play, while females were more likely to groom. Most interactions were initiated by the primates.

These reports may shed light on the evolutionary origins of pet-keeping behavior in humans, the team writes. Of course, these cross-species relationships aren’t the same as humans having a cat or a dog. “The authors say so themselves: Nearly all these interactions are ephemeral, whereas keeping a pet is a durable caretaking bond,” Sueur says. But the behaviors “may represent some of the evolutionary building blocks from which human-animal companionship eventually emerged,” Grueter adds in a statement.

The findings indicate that “some of the behavioral capacities that make pet-keeping possible (curiosity, tolerance, caregiving and maintaining long-term relationships with another species) did not suddenly appear in humans but have deeper evolutionary roots,” Grueter adds in an email to Defector’s Sabrina Imbler.

When did pet-keeping emerge?

Researchers do not know exactly when people started keeping pets, but evidence of domestication reaches to at least 12,000 years ago. A 14,000-year-old grave in Germany preserved a man and woman buried alongside a dog, whose bones showed evidence that it had been cared for.

A few cases, however, showed some longer-term care. A group of black-striped capuchin monkeys seemingly adopted an infant common marmoset in Brazil in 2004. The young monkey received care from two “adoptive ‘mothers,’” per the paper, and tolerance from others in the group, where it remained for at least ten months. A captive western gorilla named Koko showed maternal behaviors—from grooming to cradling and protective posturing—toward a kitten named All Ball in the 1980s. News reports in 2017 described a crested macaque in an Israeli zoo repeatedly cuddling, grooming and playing with a chicken that wandered into its enclosure.

Next, Sueur says, he would like to see “studies that take the other species’ point of view." He adds: "Almost everything we know is measured from the primate’s side; deer, dogs and pigs are treated as the setting rather than as partners.” If some of these interactions, such as the primates riding the sika deer, are to be seen as shared culture between the species, then they are not one-sided. This kind of relationship, he adds, “only makes sense if you watch both.”

Do LLMs "think" in a similar way to humans? Or is it totally different?

Maybe it's a good idea to listen to someone who publishes papers on this very subject, and is a professor of both philosophy and psychiatry and directs an Institute for Cognitive Science. That person is Dr. Chandra Sripada and his insights are fascinating.

Sean Carroll (interviewer, scientist and science communicator) says this interview made him lean towards the answer being "yes, they think like humans" whereas previously he favored the opposite view.