Adriana Hora dos Santos stands waist-deep in the water. Her dark hair is tied in a single braid; her arms and torso covered by a pink Lycra shirt. The thick mangrove mud reaches her thighs. Using a machete just over 40-centimeters (16-inches) long, she pries dozens of oysters from the twisted roots with a steady cadence: Not too fast, not too slow. Across the Vaza-Barris river, the buildings of Sergipe’s state capital Aracaju seem otherworldly. Here, one hears the lapping of the water, the strike of the blade and Santos’s voice: “I am, I am a shellfish gatherer / Queen of the mangrove, I am a warrior! / I am, I am a shellfish gatherer / A fighting woman, a striver / It’s the wind that gives it to me / It’s the river, it’s the mangrove, it’s the sea / My chest aches, enclosed river / My chest aches with no fish caught / Come, woman, fight, emancipate yourself / We are Sergipe’s shellfish gatherers!” This is the anthem of the Movement of Women Shellfish Gatherers of Sergipe (MMS), a grassroots collective that has resisted continuous environmental degradation and cultural erasure for decades. Acting as guardians of the mangrove, they do environmental protection work while facing pressures that put their own survival at risk. To hear one of these women is to hear many: Their verbs almost always come in the plural. “We are always in a flock,” Santos says. And it was as a flock that they introduced…This article was originally published on Mongabay

On a Wednesday in July, deep in a coastal restinga area of Brazil’s Paraná state, muffled footsteps broke through the chirping of manakins. Three field researchers from the conservation NGO Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education (SPVS) moved carefully along a trail, each carrying a small cage covered in a dark cloth. Each cage held a black-faced lion tamarin, known locally as the caissara lion tamarin (Leontopithecus caissara). Captured safely from the canopy, the three small primates — two males and one female — were carried to a makeshift tent in a forest clearing, where they would make history. Within hours, they would become the first of their species to be vaccinated against yellow fever. A team of researchers and veterinarians was waiting, quickly transferring each tamarin into a cotton bag to be weighed, starting a race against the clock to protect one of Brazil’s most threatened mammals. L. caissara is one of four lion tamarin species endemic to the Atlantic Forest; it ranks among the world’s rarest primates. First found and described by science in 1990, its wild population was estimated at just 392 individuals in a 2011 study. Most tamarins are confined to coastal restinga areas along the São Paulo-Paraná state border. A Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education veterinarian examines a sedated black-faced lion tamarin. Image by Gabriel Marchi. The species’ already restricted range has also been fragmented for decades. Part of the problems started with the Varadouro Canal, a 6-kilometer (3.7-mile)-long, 50-meter (164-feet)-wide artificial…This article was originally published on Mongabay