Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. The platypus offers a useful lesson in conservation: before acting, it helps to know where the animal still lives, and where risks are growing. Australia’s best-known oddity is also difficult to count, reports contributor Paul Harvey for Mongabay. It feeds around dawn and dusk, spends much of its life underwater in rivers, and leaves few obvious signs. That makes its decline harder to measure and harder to manage. The IUCN Red List classifies the species as near threatened, based on an estimate of about 50,000 animals, though researchers say the true number is uncertain. That uncertainty has become more important as pressure on rivers increases. Drought can shrink the pools where platypuses feed. Bushfires can damage riverbanks and nearby vegetation. Floods can inundate burrows before animals can escape. Pollution from wastewater, mining, industry, and urban runoff can reduce the aquatic invertebrates that make up much of their diet. There is room for optimism because scientists have now developed a framework for deciding when to help platypuses where they are and when animals may need to be moved. Zoos are also preparing for a clearer role in emergencies, including temporary care for animals stranded by drought, fire, or flood. Citizen science can help close the information gap. Projects that map sightings show where platypuses are still being seen. Environmental DNA, collected from water samples, can detect their presence without needing to trap or even…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Tuna offer a useful case study for World Ocean Day because their recovery has come through the least sentimental parts of conservation: quotas, enforcement, stock assessments, and years of difficult diplomacy. By the early 2010s, several tuna stocks were in serious trouble. Atlantic bluefin had become a marker of overfishing. Pacific bluefin had fallen to a small fraction of its historic abundance. The risk was ecological and commercial. Governments were looking at the possible collapse of one of the world’s most valuable fisheries. The response was slow, contested, and often technical. Regional fisheries bodies tightened catch limits, improved monitoring, began adopting automated harvest rules, and expanded electronic catch-documentation systems to make illegal and unreported fishing harder to hide. Fleets built around high catches had to accept lower quotas. The politics were difficult because the countries involved often had competing economic interests. That is part of what makes the outcome worth studying. Atlantic bluefin are showing strong signs of recovery, backed by decades of tagging, catch data, and population modeling. Pacific bluefin reached a key rebuilding target years ahead of schedule. Across commercial tuna fisheries, a much larger share of global catch now comes from stocks assessed as being at healthy levels. This does not mean the oceans have returned to abundance. Some stocks, particularly Indian Ocean yellowfin, remain in poor condition. Rebuilding to 20% of historic biomass is a critical scientific milestone for safety, not total restoration. Bycatch of sharks, turtles, and seabirds remains a serious problem, and some regional…This article was originally published on Mongabay