A Year of Offshore Oil Spills Prompts Growing Concern in Mexico

Spills by the state oil company Pemex lead to complaints over compensation, oversight and transparency

Locals clean Agua Dulce beach in the municipality of Lerdo de Tejada, Veracruz state, Mexico. The state oil company Pemex reported 798 pipeline spills and leaks to its financial regulators during 2014-2025 (Image: Rodrigo Soberanes)

By Dialogue Earth 2026-10-22 

[By Rodrigo Soberanes]

In early March, Andrés Palma was watching his children build a sandcastle on the beach in El Bosque, south-east Mexico. The fisher soon noticed that something was not quite right: his children were playing in sand laced with crude oil residue.

Palma was witnessing the consequences of a huge oil spill that happened in February, which triggered a 30-day fishing ban and has contaminated fishing grounds along the Gulf coast. Its source was initially disputed but in mid-April, the government said the source was a leaking pipeline in the offshore Abkatun oil field, in the Gulf’s south-eastern corner. In the months since the ban has been lifted, fishers like Palma continue to deal with a crashed local market and fish contamination fears.

“Here, if you don’t go out fishing, you don’t eat,” explains the 31-year-old.

The government initially denied any link to the state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex). In its April announcement, however, the government confirmed that three state officials had been removed in relation to alleged failures to contain the spill and communicate with the public.

Palma’s is just one Mexican community to be hit by an oil spill in 2026. Data obtained by Dialogue Earth through public information requests shows Pemex has reported nearly 100 spills a year over the past four years, a sudden and sharp increase. It also reveals a large discrepancy between spills reported to financial regulators and the data in its own sustainability reports.

In the affected communities, residents tell Dialogue Earth of fouled beaches, dead wildlife and devastated livelihoods.

“This data makes us question the viability of continuing with this fossil fuel model that endangers people and the environment,” says Viridiana Lázaro, a senior climate change and oceans campaigner for Greenpeace Mexico.

Inconsistent numbers

Tracking Pemex’s spills is not straightforward, as different numbers are reported to different regulators.

As Pemex has bonds issued in the US, it is required to file reports with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as the National Banking and Securities Commission in Mexico. From the start of 2014 to the end of 2025, Pemex reported 798 pipeline spills and leaks to these financial regulators.

This number is significantly lower than the spill and leak events documented by Pemex in its annual sustainability reports, which amount to 5,517 between 2020 and 2024.

It is also significantly different from the data collected by the Mexican agency for environmental protection in the hydrocarbon sector, which counted 274 events for the period March 2020-May 2026. The agency excluded February’s Gulf spill from this count. The company has been approached for comment.

Different regulators have different reporting, and there is no suggestion the company has failed to comply with reporting requirements. But some feel the company should be doing more monitoring of leaks and spills.

“Pemex is not doing its job [of adequately collecting data on spills],” claims Diana Papoulias, a retired researcher for the US government’s Geological Survey agency. In April she released her report, “The environmental debt of Pemex”, supported by a coalition of environmental NGOs. A long-term series of oil spills in the same areas are also compounding the environmental damage. The Gulf of Mexico Observatory created a group in April to monitor the spill, which then reported another, new spill in the Gulf on 10 September.

“There are leaks every day; there are spills every day of varying sizes,” claims Papoulias. “Pemex has failed to invest money in environmental protection or system improvements.”

Dialogue Earth requested an interview with Pemex to address the differences in data reported in different places and the status of February’s oil spill but has not received a response.

No fishing, no support

Like many of those impacted by the spill earlier this year, Palma continued fishing after the ban was lifted. But due to fears the fish are contaminated with oil, fishmongers now pay him MXN 10 per kg for the sierra fish he brings. Before the spill, he could make MXN 60 per kg.

The spill has been particularly destabilising for the Palma family, whose lives have already been upended in recent years. In November 2023, after years of encroachment, they were one of at least 60 families moved out of El Bosque, where rising sea levels linked to climate change have washed away the coastline, homes and public infrastructure.

The family now lives 10 km from the coast in a new community for displaced inhabitants, also named El Bosque. Palma goes out fishing at four in the afternoon and does not return until the following morning. As well as bringing back fish, these days there is oil, too.

Fishing has been practically paralysed in the affected areas since March. Fishers say the oil has clogged their engines, ruined their boats and destroyed their ability to make a living.

“The pollution is massive,” says Palma. “The fishing nets come back stained, and dirt gets on your clothes.” In March, Pemex announced a fund of MXN 35 million (USD 1.9 million) to support fishers affected by the spill. The company said it had given 3,379 fishers MXN 15,000 each in economic support, which amounts to MXN 50,685,000.

According to fishermen interviewed by Greenpeace Mexico, this has been difficult to access because it has been earmarked for fishers’ cooperatives, which excludes many of them.

Palma asserts that “no fisher receives any resources from the government” in his community.

Luis Alberto Romero Reyes, a 33-year-old fisherman from the municipality of Ángel R Cavada in Veracruz state, does not belong to any cooperatives and has not received compensation from the government. “For most local fishermen, there has been no fishing since the spill,” he says, confirming that “only the cooperatives get help.”

In July, a group of more than 500 fishers from Indigenous Nahua communities in Veracruz announced legal action to force Pemex to recognise them as spill victims. These fishers are not registered under any cooperative or fishing organisation. “We demand fair compensations for the spill’s impacts, health care, restoration of damaged ecosystems and punishment for those [authorities] responsible,” said the fisher Oved Hernández at a press conference on 10 July.

Controversy surrounding government support for fishers and other workers affected by oil spills is common in communities across the country.

Along Oaxaca’s Pacific coast, eight oil spills were registered during June and July of 2026 by that state’s Salina Cruz municipal authorities. These have spurred protests by fishers and salt workers, who demand compensation and temporary employment through beach clean-ups and oil pipeline repairs until their regular work can resume.

Greenpeace’s Lázaro says this type of temporary government support should be minimised, because “it will not serve them in the long run.” The focus should instead be on the remediation of affected areas, he adds.

A dark future

By mid-April, as endangered green and Kemp’s ridley turtles arrived for their nesting season, the oil had reached Agua Dulce – a turtle sanctuary in Veracruz.

Fisherman Romero tells Dialogue Earth he happened upon a washed-up adult green turtle in the area that vultures were feeding on. “[It] was decomposing, covered in tar.”

According to Guadalupe Reyes, Romero’s mother and a volunteer at the sanctuary, the number of turtles arriving on the beaches is lower than previous years. She blames the oil. They have collected the eggs from a single nest for safekeeping; in previous seasons, she says, volunteers would have collected eggs from more than 10 nests over the same period.

“It hurts us a lot,” says Reyes. “We have affection and care for everything that lives in the sea.”

The Gulf of Mexico Reef Corridor Network (RCAGM), comprising 25 community organisations and turtle conservation camps, is behind a civic monitoring map. The map has pinpointed more than 100 oil contamination sites spread across approximately 1,200 km of coastline since March.

The RCAGM fears this oil may be damaging a network of deep reefs. Discovered in 2013, the network stretches for 650 km from northern Veracruz to El Bosque’s state, Tabasco. One of the reefs is located directly underneath an area of water where some of the spill has been spotted.

To date, however, there is no government data on the extent of harm caused to the ocean’s ecosystem. Between the start of the spill and 27 April, the RCAGM recorded the deaths of 22 sea turtles, four dolphins, two pelicans and a manatee. The survey has not been updated since, but some are worried these numbers underplay the likely damage caused.

That damage is complex and will continue to unfurl for more than a decade according to Omar Arellano, an environmental researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

Based on past spills, such as the catastrophe that followed the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in US waters in the Gulf in 2010, Arellano foresees disruption to the distribution of fish as they avoid contaminated waters. This will add to fishers’ problems, forcing them to seek out new fishing locations potentially further away.

Arellano also anticipates oil compounds accumulating in small organisms, which will then build up in their predators – a process known as biomagnification. “This has probably already begun to happen but it will not be observed until some time has passed.”

Dialogue Earth has contacted the government to request data on the number of litres spilled into the Gulf in February, a description of the actions taken under Mexico’s National Spill Contingency Plan, and the details of its repair, restoration and compensation plans. The request was refused due to ongoing criminal investigations.

The Gulf of Mexico Observatory group is yet to present an in-depth assessment of the harms from the oil spill, nor any updates on its research.

In April, the Mexican government said it had collected 915 tonnes of hydrocarbon residue, from the sea and 48 beaches. It also said “most corals” in the area it had assessed did not display any evidence of residues. No further cleanup or mitigation updates have been shared.

Pemex tells Dialogue Earth it continues to respond to the spill, through activities covering containment, cleanup, environmental monitoring and social assistance; the company did not respond to any direct questions.

Papoulias says she is not clear how Pemex and the government have been identifying, characterising and remediating contaminated sites and this creates “significant uncertainty” for local people and fishers. She fears that, without stricter environmental supervision, there will continue to be a large number of spills and leaks along Mexico’s coast.

“We must avoid spills at sea as much as possible because they are the worst. Any onshore spill can be cleaned up to a certain extent – quite effectively, in fact – but a spill at sea […] has to be dealt with very quickly because it spreads extremely rapidly and reaches the coast,” says Papoulias.

In Tabasco, Palma remains at sea until dawn. He hopes to no longer find the black stains on his net, and to return home to oil-free coastline. He wants his children to be able to play there safely, “because they are used to a life spent going to the beach”. He wants their sandcastles to be free of oil.

Rodrigo Soberanes is a Mexican journalist specialising in the environment, communities and human mobility. He has reported from various Latin American countries and written for media outlets including CIPER Chile, Anfibia and El Faro. He is the founder of La Marea Veracruz.

The opinions expressed herein are the author's and not necessarily those of The Maritime Executive.

 

Wild birds rewrite rules for travel

The largest study of flight costs in the wild finds that riding the air can make flying cheaper than swimming, overturning a textbook ranking

Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

FacebookX

LinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

image: 

Adult male condor in Patagonia showing the soaring flight that allows birds to flap remarkably little despite their large size.

view more 

Credit: Facundo Vital

An Andean condor and a trumpeter swan both weigh about 11 kilograms. Yet the condor covers each kilometer of flight for about a fifth of the swan’s energy bill. The difference is the air: the condor rides rising currents and flaps for 0.1% of its flight time, while the swan flaps for 99%. A new study of 50 bird and bat species in the wild showed that once the atmosphere is taken into account, flying can be the cheapest form of travel.

“To us, the sky might just look like background for flying animals, but it is an essential resource that can dramatically change the cost of a journey,” says first author Dr. Martina Scacco.

Textbooks rank the ways animals travel by cost: swimming is the cheapest, flying comes next, and running is the most expensive. That ranking comes from laboratory measurements of animals in swim tanks, in flight tunnels, and on treadmills. Outside the lab, the study found that this ranking changes.

“The laboratory rules tell us that condors and swans must have the same energy bill because they have the same body mass. Yet seeing how condors soar and swans flap, we know that clearly there must be a difference,” says senior author Prof. Emily Shepard from Swansea University.

The study put a price on that difference: the condor’s cost of transport was 79% lower than the swan’s, making soaring flight cheaper than swimming.

"When flying animals have access to natural atmospheric flows, they have free fuel from the sky. This study exposes the mistakes we make when we ignore the real-world conditions that animals have been responding to for millennia,” adds Shepard.

Published in Science, the work led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) and Swansea University is the largest study yet to examine the cost of long-distance travel for wild animals. It combines 17 years of GPS and accelerometer tracking from 850 birds and bats of 38 species with four years of radar data covering 12 size classes of smaller flyers. The animals range in size from about 12 grams to more than 11 kilograms. An international team of 68 researchers contributed data to the project.

The study is the first to factor in the role of atmosphere in the movement of so many wild animals at a global scale, offering a key to conservation and management of aerial species.

“If atmospheric conditions change, so too will the cost of flight, and therefore how animals decide to migrate and establish communities,” says senior author Dr. Kamran Safi from MPI-AB.

The findings offer a new framework for predicting the energetic cost of flight, and how climatic changes might affect where and when animals travel in the future.

Measuring cost of transport in the wild

The team used accelerometers to tell apart high-cost flapping from low-cost soaring. With GPS data, they matched each stretch of flight with the wind and rising air the animals met on the way. This enabled them to calculate the time individual animals spent flapping or soaring along a stretch of flight, and to approximate how much energy they spent per meter travelled—their cost of transport.

“We boiled the differences down to fuel economy, nature’s equivalent of miles per gallon,” says Scacco. This allowed the scientists to compare transport costs across species and flight modes, “like we compare freight costs of sea mail or air mail,” she adds.

Indeed, when compared, the 50 species fell into two main groups: soarers and flappers. Among the soaring birds, size had a marked effect on transport cost: the heavier a soaring bird, the less it flapped and therefore the lower its cost of transport.

How to fly a hundred laps of the planet

Soaring vultures offer a vivid example. The seven vulture species in the study flew for a combined 128,000 days and more than 4.3 million kilometers, enough to circle the planet more than 100 times. Remarkably, they achieved that while flapping only 0.1% to 7% of flight time. And the heaviest vulture, the Andean condor, flapped least of all.

They did this by exploiting atmospheric energy. Soaring birds rode rising columns of air, which lowered their cost of transport the most, “like us riding the elevator to the top floor,” says Shepard. “Soarers are masters at extracting energy from the environment. When conditions are right, they can drive their costs down to very little.”

But conditions are not always right. The larger the soaring bird, the more restricted they were in terms of when and where they could fly.

Costly, but flexible flight

Flapping birds, on the other hand, use high-energy movement to cope with more variable conditions. Wind had the most significant effect on their transport costs, with tailwinds providing support and headwinds presenting resistance.

Says Safi: “Air can drive flight costs up as well as down for flappers. What surprised us was just how much flappers operate in costly conditions where their fuel economy is really low. We hope that our framework will drive further investigations of the different trade-offs these two groups face, and of potential energy saving mechanisms we might still be missing.”

In future work, the authors aim to build on their findings by measuring animals’ energy use directly, such as through heart rate monitoring. Doing so will capture differences in individual physiology, providing an even more realistic measure of the energetic cost of flight.

---

Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.aee6550

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

Airflows redefine the cost of aerial transport in the wild

Article Publication Date

15-Oct-2026

Related News Releases

• Wild birds rewrite rules for travel
  (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior)

Condors in Patagonia [VIDEO] 

Adult male condor in Patagonia showing the soaring flight that allows birds to flap remarkably little despite their large size.

Credit

Alvaro Moya Riffo

Atmospheric conditions shape the energy costs of animal flight

Summary author: Walter Beckwith

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Facebook

WeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

Studying data from 50 species of birds and bats using 17 years of observations has provided insights that challenge the traditional view that flight has a predictable energetic cost that’s always higher than the cost of other types of movement, like swimming or resting. Birds and bats can dramatically reduce the energy needed to travel, the new study shows, by exploiting winds and rising air currents. But to date, these environmental effects have largely been overlooked in estimates of flight costs. Current estimates of the energetic costs of movement across the animal kingdom are largely based on laboratory studies that do not capture the widely variable environmental conditions animals encounter in the wild. In nature, animals routinely exploit moving air and wind to reduce the energy required to travel long distances. These effects are particularly important for flying animals, as winds can dramatically alter how fast they travel, while updrafts can allow soaring birds to almost eliminate the need for flapping their wings and move vast distances at very low energetic costs. Although how atmospheric conditions influence birds’ flight behavior has been studied, the realized effect of these conditions on energy expenditure has not been measured directly. Here, Martina Scacco and colleagues measured the effective cost of transport – the energy flying animals use to travel a given distance – under real-world conditions. Scacco et al. analyzed data from 50 species of birds and bats spanning three orders of magnitude in body size (~12 grams to more than 11 kilograms), using 17 years of high-resolution GPS and acceleration sensor measurements from 850 animals, which was supplemented by radar observations of smaller species. The global biologging dataset allowed the authors to analyze how often animals flapped their wings versus soaring or gliding during sustained flights and compare the energetic costs of flights across species and environmental conditions.

 

The findings show that the energetic cost of flight in the wild largely depends on how animals interact with the atmosphere. Soaring birds, particularly larger species, can dramatically reduce their energy use by exploiting rising air currents and other atmospheric streams. This, in some cases, reduced flight costs to levels comparable to swimming or even resting. In contrast, frequent flapping species generally have flight costs closer to laboratory predictions and experience greater variation depending on wind conditions. According to the authors, the findings challenge the traditional view that flight has a predictable energetic cost based primarily on body size and biomechanics. Instead, Scacco et al. argue that atmospheric conditions are a fundamental part of flying animals’ energetic landscape and should be incorporated into models of animal movement, migration, and responses to environmental change. “The findings of Scacco et al. encourage researchers to further develop device-tracking technologies and conduct detailed wind-tunnel measurements of the metabolic costs of different flight modes,” writes Anders Hedenström in a related Perspective.

---

Journal

Science

DOI

10.1126/science.aee6550

Article Title

Airflows redefine the cost of aerial transport in the wild

Article Publication Date

15-Oct-2026

Reintroduction of vultures to France causes friction with farmers

France’s vulture population is growing, thanks to a reintroduction campaign that began in the 1980s after the birds all but disappeared decades earlier. But according to some farmers, the return of the birds has brought challenges as well as rewards.


Issued on: 04/10/2026 - RFI

Griffon vultures arrive at a feeding station managed by the LPO Grands Causses, July 2026. © Sarah Elzas/RFI

By:  Sarah Elzas


Watching vultures feed is an impressive sight. Dozens of birds with wingspans of up to two metres descend simultaneously on to an animal carcass, jostling to get as close as possible.

“It's a real melée, a real scrum. They really go in on each other, they jump on each other’s backs. Anything goes,” says Robert Straughan, looking down over the edge of a cliff at a clearing 100 metres below, where he has just sent a sheep carcass on a zip line pulley.

Straughan, who is vulture project director for the League for the Protection of Birds (LPO) in the Grands Causses – an area of high limestone plateaus and deep river gorges in France's highland Massif Central region – collects sheep carcasses from farmers three times a week and brings them here, and to another feeding site in the Tarn River gorge.

Listen to a report on vultures in the Grands Causses on the Spotlight on France podcast, episode 150.

Spotlight on France, episode 150 © RFI

While most farmers in France use a collection service to remove the carcasses of dead animals, which takes them to an industrial rendering plant, in the Grands Causses 120 farms have vulture feeding sites, where they leave carcasses on their land for the birds to consume.

A handful of farmers in the area also work directly with the LPO, which collects their carcasses within 48 hours.

“We're doing work which even the farmers don’t necessarily like doing – dragging the carcasses about and things like that,” Straughan says.

He holds up a scope to scan the birds feeding below, looking for those with identification rings on their legs.

“These vultures know this area. They more or less know when to come, and they know there's no danger. They'll come in really close to us, which doesn't really usually happen. But here they know that we pose no threat to them,” says Straughan.

Back from the brink, the bearded vulture makes a cautious return to French Alps

Robert Straughan looks for vultures in the cliffs along the Jonte river gorge, July 2026. © Sarah Elzas/RFI

'Bad press'

While there is no threat today, throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries people shot and poisoned vultures, which were viewed with suspicion, associated with death and decay.

Vultures can eat dead animals at almost any stage of decomposition, thanks to their highly acidic stomachs which kill most microbes and viruses.

“Vultures get a bad press. Everybody thinks, ‘oh, vultures... death, dirty birds’... even in the way they are portrayed in art,” Straughan says.

“But when you look into vultures and you understand how they function and the important role they play in cleaning an ecosystem, the role they play with farmers, you find that they're quite wonderful birds – even if they're not always that pretty, depending on whose eyes you look through.”

By the 1940s, vultures had all but disappeared from France.

Then in 1976 the government designated the griffon vulture a protected species, and a few years later conservationists, working with farmers in the Grands Causes, began work on a reintroduction programme.

The region boasts the ideal conditions for the birds: craggy limestone cliffs for nests and plenty of sheep farms to provide a food source.

Between 1981 and 2006 around 300 griffon vultures were reintroduced. Today there are more than 1,200 breeding pairs in the Grands Causses, or two-thirds of the population in France.

Vultures in the trees at the LPO feeding station on the Grands Causses, July 2026. 

© Sarah Elzas/RFI

Success decided by species

Griffon vultures feed primarily on soft tissue, and are usually the first to arrive at a carcass. The three other European vulture species have had less success. There are fewer than 40 breeding pairs of black vultures, which feed on skin and tendons, and three breeding pairs of Egyptian vultures, which pick meat from between bones.

There are no breeding pairs of bearded vultures, which eat the bones themselves.

Straughan notes the presence of two black vultures at the feeding site, a few minutes after the first scrum of griffon vultures.

"They come in usually second. They're a bit stronger and they bust their way on to the carcass and get the parts they want.”

“They're very, very effective,” he notes, as the vultures strip the carcass in less than 10 minutes.

More than half of endangered species in France are not protected: report

After eating, the vultures head to a nearby tank of water.

“After the feed they really like to go and have a drink and a bath as well, and usually you'll see them sitting on the rocks with their wings open, a bit like cormorants, to dry off,” explains Straughan.

However, this is a cause of tension with farmers. The area’s porous limestone does not retain water, so farmers provide troughs for their sheep to drink from – which attract the vultures.

“That's problematic because afterwards the sheep won't drink, and so the farmer has to change the water regularly,” Straughan says. “But we work with the farmers and try to find systems to make the troughs less attractive for the vultures.”

Solutions such as floating covers have been introduced, and they are becoming increasingly necessary as the vulture population grows.
Attacks on animals

Water use is not the only point of friction. There have been reports from farmers that vultures have attacked animals they believe were still alive at the time.

The first reports appeared in the early 2000s, and authorities in Aveyron, Lozère and other departments have since put in place phone numbers for farmers to call in the case of suspected attacks.

An inspector is then dispatched, sometimes accompanied by a vet, to determine the cause of death.

Lilia Damian, who is in charge of relations with farmers at the LPO, says in the vast majority of cases the conclusion was that the animals were already dead when the vultures arrive. Attacks on live animals are “very unusual”, she says.

“They are on animals that are consistently very weak, with a very low life expectancy. It’s not just an animal that’s a bit tired and not moving much.”

A 2018 report by researchers from France’s then national wildlife agency, the ONCFS, found that of the 156 suspected attacks reported over the previous seven years, 63 involved vultures.

In 15 of those cases, vultures arrived before the animals died, and either accompanied or worsened the animals’ decline but did not cause the deaths.

“Griffon vultures do not have the physical capacity to prey on a live animal,” Damian says. “Their beaks are not very powerful. It is the same with the legs. Compared with an eagle’s talons, they are not powerful or able to grasp. They are really just adapted for walking, and they cannot hold on to an animal.”

However, she adds that the growth in population means the birds arrive faster, sometimes before a farmer can locate the dying animal.

“Because they forage in groups, their searches are inevitably becoming more efficient. They arrive faster at a carcass. Before it could take several hours, which gave the farmer time to notice. That’s not necessarily the case anymore. The animals are also consumed more quickly.”

However, she says the number of suspected vulture attacks has not increased, even as the vulture population has risen dramatically.

A balanced relationship

Nonetheless, Damian says these concerns colour how people view the birds, which can be an issue when it comes to conservation efforts.

Farmers’ unions and representatives have called for limits on the vulture population, which the LPO argues is not the right approach, arguing that natural limits on food and habitat will regulate the population.

“When people talk about there being too many, I often ask: ‘compared to what?’,” says Damian. “Ecologically, a population is limited either by its habitat or by its food supply. If we reach a point where there isn’t enough food for all the vultures, there will be higher mortality. So the population will hit a plateau and self-regulate based on the available food.”

For now, as farmers continue to use their feeding stations or the LPO’s collection service, there is sufficient food and the griffon vultures are doing well.

“There are for sure a lot of griffon vultures now, more than before. The population is doing well, and the reintroduction has been a success. That said, other species are in a completely different state of conservation,” says Damian.

Unlike similarly reintroduced predators such as wolves and bears, vultures depend on humans – and can also be quite useful to them.

“It's almost entirely down to the good relationship which we have with farmers, and their willingness to use the vultures as a way of a carcass disposal system, if you like,” says Straughan. “It's a big benefit for them and it's a big benefit for the vultures too.”

Mystery elephant deaths in Kenya leave experts divided over cause

Conservationists and Maasai communities are calling for urgent answers as paralysis-like symptoms spread among elephants in Kenya's Amboseli National Park, with competing theories emerging over what is causing their deaths.


Issued on: 23/08/2026 - RFI

A mystery affliction has killed at least 20 elephants, mostly females or young males, since June in Kenya. © SIMON MAINA / AFP

A mysterious ailment has killed at least 20 elephants in southern Kenya since June, alarming conservationists and local communities as experts struggle to determine the cause of the deaths.

The latest victim was an 11-year-old male known as Genghis Khan, who was found lying on the ground in the Kitenden B reserve near Amboseli National Park, unable to stand and struggling to breathe.

Veterinarians tried to revive him with a glucose injection – one of the few options available while the cause of the illness remains unknown – but he died on Tuesday after repeatedly trying and failing to get back on his feet.

The deaths have affected mostly females and young males, with the animals displaying strikingly similar symptoms, including weakness and partial paralysis.

The incidents are particularly sensitive in the Amboseli ecosystem, a major wildlife destination overlooked by Mount Kilimanjaro across the border in Tanzania. Its elephant herds are one of the region’s biggest tourist attractions, making their unexplained deaths a concern both for conservationists and for communities whose livelihoods depend heavily on tourism.

“You would find one struggling for a day, struggling for two or even three days. Until they completely die,” said Patrick Papatiti, head of operations for the Olgulului communal lands, which include the Kitenden B reserve.

The growing number of carcasses has added to concern among conservationists.

At one site, the remains of a four-month-old calf lay partly eaten by hyenas and covered in flies. Elsewhere, vultures fed on the carcass of a pregnant elephant that had died close to giving birth, along with her unborn calf.

Poisoning suspicions

In late July, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said toxicology tests had detected high concentrations of cyanide in the elephant carcasses, raising the possibility that the animals had been poisoned by pesticides linked to nearby farms.

But a number of local wildlife experts and conservationists have dismissed this theory.

Papatiti, who grew up in the local Maasai community, believes the elephants are suffering from a disease rather than poisoning. He said there was “no way” cyanide could explain the pattern of deaths.

One reason for the scepticism is the apparent absence of deaths among other animals who have come into contact with the carcasses.

Scavengers including hyenas, vultures and insects have continued feeding on the remains without showing obvious signs of poisoning – something local observers say would be unusual if high levels of toxic chemicals were responsible.

The remains of an 11-year-old elephant named Genghis Khan in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, 18 August. © Patrick Papatiti

“If another animal feeds on that carcass and it is not dying, then definitely it is not a chemical,” said Joel Nyika, Amboseli ecosystem manager for the Kajiado County authorities.

Nyika also questioned suggestions that naturally occurring cyanide in vegetation could be responsible, arguing that if that were the case livestock grazing in the same areas would most likely also have been affected.

“As wildlife managers, we believe it could be a disease that is only affecting these elephants,” he said.

Paula Kahumbu, conservationist and head of Wildlife Direct, said there was still too little evidence to support the pesticide theory.

She also noted that relatively few adult males had died, despite the fact that they are the most likely to enter farmland and raid crops – behaviour that would theoretically expose them more to agricultural chemicals or deliberate poisoning.

Papatiti has also rejected the idea that farmers are intentionally poisoning elephants.

Hundreds of elephants die in Botswana in mysterious circumstances

However, the KWS said the evidence gathered so far does not point towards an infectious or transmissible disease. In a statement on 7 August, the wildlife authority said its findings had not indicated a contagious illness and sought to reassure visitors that travelling to the area remained safe.

Rather than looking for individuals to blame, Papatiti said, the priority should be establishing exactly what is causing the animals to fall ill.

He believes more elephants may have died without this being recorded and is concerned that similar cases could be occurring across the nearby border in Tanzania, part of the same wider ecosystem used by roaming herds.

“How many elephants will die before we can stop this?” he asked.

(with AFP)