Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe is seeking to purchase important Tribal lands to create a corridor for wildlife conservation as part of a partnership agreement with the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation.

The corridor will connect 18 million acres of contiguous privately owned and state wilderness that are the habitat of endangered species like Florida panthers and Key deer, reported The Guardian.

“The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida have stewarded the lands and waters of Florida since time immemorial. The entirety of this land, and her flora and fauna, have been shaped by successive generations of our people. Our collective Indigenous Knowledge offers a unique perspective informed by this deep and historic relationship to the lands and waters of the National Wildlife Refuge System that lie within our traditional lands,” said Talbert Cypress, chair of the Miccosukee Tribe, in a press release from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).

During the Seminole Wars two centuries ago, Tribal members sought to protect the Everglades and avoid banishment by government forces to Indian territories in what is now Oklahoma.

In January, the Miccosukee Tribe entered into an agreement with FWS for co-stewardship of national wildlife refuges in South Florida. The agreement means Miccosukee citizens can once again hunt, fish, gather culturally significant and medicinal plants and conduct ceremonies in the refuges adjacent to traditional Miccosukee lands and within the Greater Everglades.

In the wake of the Trump administration’s slashing of federal funds for conservation projects, the Miccosukee Tribe has stepped in to fulfill what it feels is a “moral obligation” to protect their sacred lands and the plants and animals found there.

“We have a constitutional duty to conserve our traditional homelands, the lands and waters which protected and fed our tribe since time immemorial,” Cypress said, as The Guardian reported. “[But] we’ve seen some sort of hesitancy a lot of times to commit to projects because of the erratic nature of how the government is deciding to spend their money or allocate money.”

The agreement was announced during a corridor stakeholders’ summit last week in Orlando. It came as a Native American Fish and Wildlife Society (NAFWS) study found that 60 percent of Tribes recognized by the federal government have lost over $56 million in federal funding since President Donald Trump took office for his second term.

Though Tribes have their own independent governments, the U.S. has legal trust responsibilities to protect rights set out in Tribal treaties regarding lands, assets and resources, a press release from The Wildlife Society (TWS) said.

“These services are part of what we receive in lieu of all of the years of what we gave up — our land, our resources and sometimes, unfortunately, our culture and language,” said Executive Director of NWFWS Julie Thorstenson in the TWS press release. “These are not things that are, in our mind, something that is really negotiable.”

A Florida panther in a tree in Naples, Collier County. Tim Donovan / Florida Fish and Wildlife

As government funding has disappeared and federal land stewardship agreements face an uncertain future due to the Trump administration’s attacks on the National Park Service, Cypress said Tribal leaders had reassessed their work with other partners.

“For good reason, my predecessors had more of a standoffish approach. They went through a lot of the areas where they did deal with conservation groups, federal agencies, state agencies, pretty much not including them in conversations, or going back on their word. They just had a very different approach to this sort of thing,” Cyprus explained, as reported by The Guardian. “My administration has taken more of a collaborative approach. We’re engaging with different organizations not just to build relationships, but fix relationships that may have gone sour in the past, or were just non-existent.”

Lawmakers established the Florida Wildlife Corridor in 2021 and have preserved approximately 10 million acres thus far, with an additional eight million considered “opportunity areas” that need protection. Environmental groups have warned that there is still the potential for large areas to be lost to development.

The Florida legislature has been considering corridor funding cuts to balance state spending, and has encouraged commercial partnerships and investment.

The Tribe has already established a direct or collaborative stewardship with nearly three million acres in Biscayne and Everglades National Parks, as well as Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. Cypress said the Tribe was working on identifying and prioritizing lands inside the corridor that had historical significance.

“Financially, the tribe will invest some money, but we’ll also be instrumental in finding investors, partners interested in the same thing, which is to conserve as much of our natural habitat as possible while making room for growth and development,” Cypress said. “We’ve shown we can do it in a sustainable way, and our voice can help in shaping the future of Florida as far as development goes because once a lot of the land gets developed we’re not going to get it back. We need to do it in a way where we benefit not just ourselves in the present, but for generations in the future as well.”

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During the recent United Nations Ocean Conference, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu governments announced plans to establish the world’s first Indigenous-led multinational ocean reserve, the Melanesian Ocean Reserve.

The planned reserve will span the Solomon Islands’, Vanuatu’s and Papua New Guinea’s national waters and connect to the Exclusive Economic Zone of New Caledonia, another protected area. The Melanesian Ocean Reserve is set to cover more than 6 million square kilometers of a region with some of the richest marine biodiversity in the world.

The envisioned Melanesian Ocean Reserve. Image courtesy of the Melanesian Ocean Reserve

“For millennia, the Indigenous Peoples of Melanesia have been the wisest and most effective stewards of these sacred waters. That is why the governments of Melanesia are joining forces to create an unprecedented ocean reserve that honours our identities, livelihoods, and spiritual connections,” Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele said in a statement.

Once complete, the new ocean reserve will be as large as the Amazon Rainforest, according to the Solomon Islands-based and Indigenous-led nonprofit Islands Knowledge Institute, which is collaborating with the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu in establishing the reserve.

Ecologist Edgar Pollard, leader of the Islands Knowledge Institute, said, “The Melanesian Ocean Reserve has progressed from an idea to a powerful platform amongst Melanesian leaders because it connects to an unmistakable truth in their lives: that treating the ocean as our home, in the deepest sense of the word, is the best protection.”

According to the Wildlife Conservation Society, the southwestern Pacific Ocean region is of great ecological and cultural importance, with extensive coral reef systems including 75% of known coral species and over 3,000 species of reef-dependent fish.

However, the region is under increasing threats from climate change, illegal fishing, and industrial trawling, among other concerns, as reported on the reserve website.

Already, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have kept more than 150,000 square kilometers of the surrounding waters safe from exploitation, and they will now be able to extend their conservation efforts to an area more than 3.5 times the size of Alaska. 

As part of the initiative, the nations plan to also provide further Indigenous knowledge on marine conservation, establish and support regenerative economies, prioritize sustainable infrastructure (including solar-powered and electric water vessels and solar power for local villages), and emphasize cultural vitality, including by only allowing customary activities in parts of the reserve.

As Mongabay reported, Papua New Guinea, which is expected to join in on establishing the reserve, has controversial deep-sea mining plans that are of concern into how they could affect the reserve.

However, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu are hopeful that this project could inspire more governments to expand their marine conservation efforts and limit exploitative activities.

“It is an objective of our National Ocean Policy to establish this transboundary corridor of traditionally managed ocean space between our countries, and we are delighted that this is now happening,” Vanuatu’s Minister for Environment Ralph Regenvanu said in a statement. “The Melanesian Ocean Reserve will give the governments and peoples of Melanesia the ability to do much more to protect our ancestral waters from those who extract and exploit without concern for our planet and its living beings. We hope our Indigenous stewardship of this vast reserve will create momentum for similar initiatives all over the world.”

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In a new study, scientists have detected high levels of mercury contamination in alligators from the Okefenokee Swamp in southeastern Georgia. The contamination in the alligators could be an indicator of more widespread heavy metal contamination in the region, which could be harmful to other wildlife, and ultimately humans.

“Alligators are very ancient creatures, and we can look at them in these areas as an indicator of what else might be happening in the ecosystem,” Kristen Zemaitis, lead author of the study and a graduate of the Odum School of Ecology at University of Georgia, said in a statement. “Studying them can relate to many different things in the food web.”

Scientists analyzed blood samples and dietary habits of 133 alligators from three different sites: Okefenokee Swamp, Georgia; Jekyll Island, Georgia; and Yawkey Wildlife Center, South Carolina. While the team found mercury in alligators from all three sites, the amount of mercury in alligators from the Okefenokee Swamp was up to eight times higher compared to the alligators along the coast. They published their findings in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

Older alligators also had higher levels of mercury, which the researchers explained could be both because of the longer time the mercury could spend accumulating as well as an increase in the volume of prey — which are likely also contaminated with mercury — that the alligators eat as they grow.

But even young alligators were found to contain mercury, as “Mothers are passing toxins and heavy metals into the egg yolks during reproduction,” Zemaitis said.

A new study found that smaller alligators and hatchlings could inherit high levels of mercury from their mothers. Chamberlain Smith / University of Georgia

Because Okefenokee Swamp shares water with the Suwannee and St. Marys rivers, the researchers warned that mercury levels found in alligators, at the top of the food chain, likely means local fish also contain mercury.

“Mercury is a neurotoxin that is very lethal to organisms,” Jeb Byers, co-author of the study and a professor at the Odum School, said in a statement. “If it builds up, it moves through the food web and creates the perfect storm. That’s what we have in the Okefenokee.”

That could also pose a threat for people who hunt or fish in this area, especially if they are consuming their catches.

“Mercury contamination can be a high concern for the people who can be consuming a lot of fish or game species from the rivers, swamps or oceans that have high mercury,” Zemaitis explained. “In any given ecosystem, there are some organisms that can tolerate only very little amounts of mercury, which can result in neurological issues, reproductive issues and eventually death.”

Following this study, Zemaitis hopes to do a deeper investigation into the source of this mercury pollution, how it spreads throughout ecosystems and how it is affecting other wildlife.

“Now that we know this about one of the apex predators in these systems, we wonder what else is being affected?” she said.

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