An old elephant can remember where to find water when the usual pools have dried. Her death leaves the herd with fewer ways to survive a drought. As elephants travel, they also carry seeds in their guts, depositing them far from the trees where they fed. In a forest emptied of large birds and mammals, trees may stand for decades after the animals that carried their seeds have disappeared. The canopy still looks intact. Delegates gathering in Yerevan, Armenia, for the U.N.’s COP17 biodiversity talks will assess countries’ progress toward slowing these losses. Some of the damage will be difficult to measure within a negotiating cycle.  Other absences are already permanent. The slender-billed curlew, last photographed in Morocco in 1995, was declared extinct in 2024. The vaquita and the Sumatran rhino still survive, though both could disappear within the next decade. A child born today may grow up knowing them through archival footage of the last few animals or AI-generated simulations. Damselfish coral and sea anemones (Indonesia). Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler Warming seas give bleached corals less time to recover between heatwaves. Now, the stress is severe enough to kill even the colonies, whose structures provide shelter for fish and other reef animals. An exceptionally strong El Niño is developing in the Pacific, adding to the heat already accumulating in the atmosphere and oceans, with the prospect of drought and fire in tropical forests. Wars currently consume budgets and attention, while authoritarian governments restrict the freedoms on which…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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