The Indo-Pacific finless porpoise is one of India’s smallest cetaceans, inhabits turbid coastal waters, and lacks a dorsal fin — all of which make it a difficult species for researchers to spot. Recent research suggests these animals are far more prevalent in Indian waters than visual sightings suggest, yet they may be disappearing before they can be accurately counted, reports contributor Mansab Sayyad for Mongabay India. A fully grown Indo-Pacific finless porpoise (Neophocaena phocaenoides) measures 1.5-1.9 meters (4.9-6.2 feet) in length and weighs about 30-45 kilograms (77-88 pounds). It’s highly inconspicuous: it has a blunt, rounded head, no dorsal fin, and occupies shallow, muddy waters, surfacing only briefly. But the finless porpoise can be “heard”. It navigates turbid waters by echolocation, emitting high-frequency pulses that are unique to the species and far above the range of human hearing — but detectable by specialized sound-recording devices. In 2025, a study counted finless porpoises using both visual and acoustic surveys off the Sindhudurg coast, north of Goa state. The acoustic surveys detected finless porpoises four times more often than visual surveys. Lead author Isha Bopardikar, from the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) Tirupati and Cornell University’s K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, said relying on visual estimates in Indian waters is a significant drawback due to limited visibility and the animal’s brief surfacing. This means that population assessments that only use conventional visual sightings from boats may be capturing only part of the picture. Understanding the population trends…This article was originally published on Mongabay

As artificial intelligence increasingly becomes a part of ecological monitoring, a growing body of research suggests integrating Indigenous ecological knowledge (IEK) into ethical frameworks for AI governance to prioritize environmental reports contributor Shradha Triveni for Mongabay. Researchers in a recent study published in the journal AI and Ethics examined how the Navajo philosophy of Hózhó, meaning balance and harmony, and the Māori concept of Kaitiakitanga or guardianship, could reshape AI development. They argue that these Indigenous values emphasize collective responsibility and reciprocity, offering a basis for questioning the environmental costs of large-scale AI models. AI tools are already being used in partnership with Indigenous communities to track illegal mining in the Amazon and causes of deforestation in the Congo Basin and Indonesia. But AI infrastructure often poses significant risks. Data centers, for instance, can place immense stress on local water resources. In another study, Sebastián Lehuedé, a researcher at King’s College London, observed that Indigenous resistance to such infrastructure, such as efforts that recently halted a Google data center in Chile, views natural resources as enabling a way of being rather than as commodities to be owned. In both studies, researchers noted that when AI tools, infrastructure or value chains exclude the values of Indigenous and local communities, they often face backlash. However, non-Indigenous engineers and developers writing Indigenous values into academic frameworks is a form of digital colonialism, said to Karaitiana Taiuru, an independent expert in Indigenous data sovereignty, referring to the study published in AI and Ethics. Taiuru…This article was originally published on Mongabay