By STEVEN GRATTAN

PUERTO NARINO, Colombia (AP) — A flash of pink breaks the muddy surface of the Amazon River as scientists and veterinarians, waist-deep in the warm current, patiently work a mesh net around a pod of river dolphins. They draw it tighter with each pass, and a spray of silver fish glistens under the harsh sun as they leap to escape the net.

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When the team hauls a dolphin into a boat, it thrashes as water streams from its pink-speckled sides and the crew quickly ferries it to the sandy riverbank where adrenaline-charged researchers lift it onto a mat. They have 15 minutes — the limit for how long a dolphin can safely be out of the water — to complete their work.

Fernando Trujillo, a marine biologist leading the effort, kneels beside the animal’s head, shielding its eye with a small cloth so it can’t see what’s happening. He rests his hand gently on the animal and speaks in low tones.

“They’ve never felt the palm of a hand. We try to calm them,” said Trujillo, sporting a pink dolphin bandana. “Taking a dolphin out of the water, it’s a kind of abduction.”

One person counts the dolphin’s breaths. Another wets its skin with a sponge while the others conduct multiple medical tests that will help show how much mercury is coursing through the Amazon’s most graceful predators.

Mercury threat spreads through the Amazon food chain

Trujillo directs the Omacha Foundation, a conservation group focused on aquatic wildlife and river ecosystems, and leads health evaluations of river dolphins. It’s a painstaking operation involving experienced fishermen, veterinarians and locals that takes months of planning and happens a couple of times a year.

“We take blood and tissue samples to assess mercury,¨ Trujillo told The Associated Press from the Colombian riverside town of Puerto Narino. “Basically, we’re using dolphins as sentinels for the river’s health.”

Mercury contamination comes mainly from illegal gold mining — a growing industry across the Amazon Basin — and forest clearing that washes mercury that naturally occurs in soil into waterways.

The miners use mercury to separate gold from sediment, then dump the sludge back into rivers, where it enters fish eaten by people and dolphins. Rising global gold prices have fueled a mining boom, and mercury pollution in remote waterways has increased.

Scientists and veterinarians capture a pink river dolphin in the Amazon River to perform health checks in Puerto Narino, Colombia, Sunday, Sept. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

Mercury can damage the brain, kidneys, lungs and immune system and cause mood swings, memory loss and muscle weakness in people, according to the World Health Organization and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Pregnant women and young children are most at risk, with prenatal exposure linked to developmental delays and reduced cognitive function.

“The maximum any living being should have is 1 milligram per kilogram,” Trujillo said. “Here, we’re seeing 20 to 30 times that amount.”

In previous years, his team found 16 to 18 milligrams per kilogram of mercury in dolphins, which can suffer the same neurological damage, organ damage and other problems as humans. In Colombia’s Orinoco River, levels in some dolphins have reached as high as 42, levels scientists say are among the most extreme ever recorded in the species.

Trujillo said it’s difficult to prove the toxin is directly killing dolphins. Further studies are underway, he added, noting that “any mammal with a huge amount of mercury will die.”

When Trujillo and his team tested their own blood three years ago, his results showed more than 36 times the safe limit — 36.4 milligrams per kilogram — a level he attributes to decades working in mercury-affected areas and a diet heavy in fish. With medical assistance, his levels have dropped to about 7 milligrams.

“Mercury is an invisible enemy until it builds up to a sufficient amount, then it starts to affect the central nervous system,” Trujillo told AP after his team managed to capture and test four pink dolphins. “We’re already seeing evidence of it in Indigenous communities.”

A series of scientific studies and reports — including work by the International Pollutants Elimination Network and academic researchers — have found high mercury exposure among Indigenous peoples across the Amazon, including in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Suriname and Bolivia. Hair samples showed averages well above WHO’s safe threshold of 1 part per million, with one Colombian community registering more than 22 milligrams per kilogram.

Dolphin populations in this part of the Amazon have plunged, with Trujillo’s monitoring showing a 52% decline in pink dolphins and a 34% drop in gray river dolphins, a different species, in recent decades. The International Union for Conservation of Nature listed the pink dolphin as endangered in 2018. Trujillo said exact numbers for the Amazon are unknown, but his organization estimates 30,000 to 45,000 across the basin.

Pink river dolphins also face threats from overfishing, accidental entanglement in nets, boat traffic, habitat loss and prolonged drought.

Colombia says it’s tackling illegal mining and mercury pollution. It banned mercury use in mining in 2018, ratified the Minamata Convention aimed at reducing mercury in the environment and submitted an action plan in 2024. Authorities cite joint operations with Brazil and recent enforcement sweeps, but watchdogs say efforts remain uneven and illegal mining persists across much of the country.

Other Amazon nations say they’re stepping up. Brazil has launched raids and moved to restrict satellite internet used by illegal gold-mining camps that use mercury, aiming to disrupt logistics and supply lines. Peru recently seized a record 4 tons of smuggled mercury. Ecuador, Suriname and Guyana have filed action plans to cut mercury use in small-scale gold mining.

A delicate operation to test dolphins safely

The dolphin testing operation relies on José “Mariano” Rangel, a charismatic former fisherman from Venezuela. He leads the charge when it’s time to haul the animals — which can weigh as much as about 353 pounds — into the small boats. It’s a moment that can end with a stinging blow to the jaw as the dolphins thrash to break free.

Scientists and veterinarians free a pink river dolphin after a health check in Puerto Narino, Colombia, Sunday, Sept. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

“The most difficult part of the captures is enclosing the dolphins,” Rangel said.

A portable ultrasound machine scans lungs, heart and other vital organs for disease. The team checks for respiratory problems, internal injuries and signs of reproduction, photograph the animals’ skin and scars, swab blowholes and genital openings for bacterial cultures, and collect tissue for mercury testing. Microchips are implanted so researchers can identify each animal and avoid duplicating tests.

Omacha has recorded antimicrobial resistance — bacteria that can’t be killed by common medicines — and respiratory problems. They have also identified possible emerging diseases, such as papilloma virus, that could pose risks to both dolphins and humans.

After a long morning hauling and testing dolphins, the scientists return to a laboratory in Puerto Narino that’s covered with posters of dolphins and manatees and the bones and skulls of dolphins and other animals. They test some samples, prepare others to send to larger facilities and end their day repairing nets and refilling kits to do it all again at dawn.

For Trujillo, each capture, scan and blood test is part of a larger fight.

“We are one step away from being critically endangered and then extinct,” Trujillo said.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Divers have recovered artifacts from the Titanic’s sister ship, the Britannic, for the first time since the ocean liner sank in the Aegean Sea more than a century ago after striking a mine during World War I.

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The Culture Ministry in Greece said Monday that an 11-member deep-sea diving team conducted a weeklong operation in May to recover artifacts including the ship’s bell and the port-side navigation light.

The White Star Line’s Britannic, launched in 1914, was designed as a luxury cruise liner, but was requisitioned as a hospital ship during World War I. It was heading toward the island of Lemnos when it struck a mine and sank off the island of Kea, about 45 miles southeast of Athens, on Nov. 21, 1916.

The vessel, the largest hospital ship at the time, sank in less than an hour. Thirty of the more than 1,060 people on board died when the lifeboats they were in were struck by the ship’s still turning propellers.

The wreck lies at a depth of nearly 400 feet, making it accessible only to technical divers. The dive team used closed-circuit rebreather equipment in a recovery operation organized by British historian Simon Mills, founder of the Britannic Foundation, the Culture Ministry said.

Conditions on the wreck were particularly tough because of currents and low visibility, the ministry said. Among the items raised to the surface were artifacts reflecting both the ship’s utilitarian role and its luxurious design: the lookout bell, the navigation lamp, silver-plated first-class trays, ceramic tiles from a Turkish bath, a pair of passenger binoculars and a porcelain sink from second-class cabins.

The artifacts are now undergoing conservation in Greek capital Athens and will be included in the permanent collection of a new Museum of Underwater Antiquities under development at the port of Piraeus. The museum will feature a dedicated World War I section, with the items from the Britannic as a centerpiece.

By JACK DURA

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — Marilyn Hagerty, a North Dakota newspaper columnist whose earnest review of her local Olive Garden restaurant became a social media sensation, died Tuesday. She was 99.

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Hagerty died at a hospital in Grand Forks from complications related to a stroke, according to her daughter Gail Hagerty. She remembered her mother as a journalist at heart who was more interested in giving readers an honest assessment of what to expect from a restaurant than in being critical.

Her 2012 Olive Garden piece was “unique and authentic, coming from a grandmother in North Dakota,” Gail Hagerty said.

In the review, she famously wrote in praise of the chain’s chicken Alfredo as “warm and comforting on a cold day.”

“As I ate, I noticed the vases and planters with permanent flower displays on the ledges,” she wrote. “There are several dining areas with arched doorways. And there is a fireplace that adds warmth to the decor.”

It spread on social media and drew national media attention to Hagerty.

“She was everywhere and she loved it and it was a wonderful experience, although she had to ask my brother what does it mean if you go viral. She didn’t know that,” Gail Hagerty said. “She used to say that if you were going to have 15 minutes of fame and if you were 86, you had to do it soon. You couldn’t wait.”

The media attention even drew in famed chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain, who defended Hagerty on Twitter from those who ridiculed her embrace of the Olive Garden chain’s food. He met with her and went on to publish a book of her columns, also writing its foreword.

In a 2014 interview conducted by oral historian Teri Finneman, Hagerty said the response to her review was unbelievable, including countless emails and phone calls as well as TV interviews and a tour of New York City.

“But most of all, it was people feeling in defense and people praising me for the way I write the Eatbeat. And — I wrote that Eatbeat column so fast one day that I never expected it to be repeated all over the country, but that’s what happened,” she said in the interview.

Hagerty was born May 30, 1926, in Pierre, South Dakota. Her newspaper career began while she was in high school, when she assisted the editor of the Pierre Capital Journal and wrote city briefs, according to her oral history.

She earned a journalism degree from the University of South Dakota, of which she was quite proud, her daughter said. She added that Hagerty was a journalist at heart who took the effort to get to know people and the community and was actively writing for more than 70 years.

Hagerty was beloved in Grand Forks due to her long career and community involvement, and in 2002 a lift station was dedicated and named in her honor. Hagerty arrived at the ceremony on a restaurant owner’s motorcycle, her daughter said.

“I’m going to leave some flowers there this evening,” Gail Hagerty said.

Hagerty was writing at least occasionally for the Grand Forks Herald until last year.

By LARRY NEUMEISTER

NEW YORK (AP) — The identities of two women once listed as potential co-conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein will remain sealed for their safety and privacy, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

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In a written decision, Judge Richard M. Berman rejected an NBC News request to make their identities public after lawyers for the women and the U.S. Justice Department opposed the unsealing request. He wrote that threats to the safety of the individuals persist and releasing their names would threaten their safety and privacy.

In requesting the unsealing, attorney Alexander Ziccardi for NBC News cited the First Amendment and said there was a “presumptive right of access” requiring that the names redacted from a July 2019 government letter to Berman be released publicly.

The 2019 letter, filed by prosecutors opposing bail for Epstein, was written in part to answer questions the judge had raised at a bail hearing about two unidentified individuals prosecutors cited in their arguments against granting Epstein bail.

Prosecutors acknowledged that their names had been publicly associated with Epstein and his alleged sexual assault on girls and young women over two decades. Epstein obtained protection for both individuals in a nonprosecution agreement he signed with federal prosecutors in Florida in 2007.

Prosecutors said in the letter that Epstein paid one potential co-conspirator $100,000 and the other $250,000 in late 2018 after the Miami Herald focused fresh attention on Epstein’s abuse and the deal he made with federal prosecutors in Florida a decade earlier that spared him from federal charges.

Federal authorities in New York, insisting that they were not bound by the 2007 nonprosecution agreement, arrested Epstein in July 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges.

In their 2019 letter, prosecutors said the woman who was paid $250,000 was one of the Epstein employees identified in the indictment.

The indictment alleged that she and two other employees facilitated Epstein’s trafficking of minors in part by contacting victims and scheduling their sexual encounters with Epstein at his Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida, residences, the letter noted.

But lawyers for the women recently adamantly opposed the release of their names. A lawyer for the woman who Epstein paid $100,000 told Berman that his client was the subject of death threats because of misinformation about her and was investigated by the FBI and found to be credible, the judge noted.

A lawyer for the second woman told Berman that investigators found that both women were “severely victimized by Jeffrey Epstein … and should be afforded the same protections that have been afforded to all other victims.”

As he awaited trial in New York, Epstein died in a federal jail in August 2019 in what was ruled a suicide. His former girlfriend, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted of sex trafficking charges in December 2021 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

Messages for comment sent to NBC and Ziccardi were not immediately returned.

A spokesperson for the prosecutor declined comment.