Mid-October saw extreme weather events, specifically unusually heavy rains in some parts of India. In Kerala, heavy downpours — an excess of 135% for the first 19 days of the…
“Powerbaaz”. “Main boss”. No, these descriptions don’t refer to any power-hungry politician or underworld don. It’s how the indigenous Warli people of Maharashtra see their animal god, the Waghoba. The…
As India is inching closer to 2022, it increasingly becomes clear that achieving an installed capacity of 40-gigawatts (GW) from the rooftop solar sector by 2022 is nearly impossible. Envisaged…
In 2019, black wattle trees stood tall in around 50 hectares of land in Pazhathottam in Kerala’s Pambadum Shola National Park. Black wattle, in India, is an exotic, invasive tree…
It was a hot summer morning and Samrat Sengupta, a masters’ student of science at the Guwahati University, was watching birds through his binoculars in a reserve forest in north-eastern…
Dive into the clear, shallow waters of the Gulf of Mannar and you'd be met with more than a hundred species of corals. Among these vivid corals of varying shapes…
Imagine sighting a wild carnivore as you go about your daily chores near your house. Your reactions may range from joy to awe, apprehension, or fear. Or even anger: maybe…
Sloth bears are the world's only bears built to eat ants. They love their occasional meat tidbits of course but thrive mostly on ants, insects, fruits and wild berries. Their…
While Kerala's contentious Athirapilly dam may be temporarily on hold due to peoples' resistance, a smaller 7.5 megawatt hydropower project in the vicinity has got both environmentalists and indigenous communities…
Coral reefs feature prominently in today's climate change discourse. Studies have shown how warming oceans worldwide cause corals to bleach: they lose the algae that give them their colours, become…
Over the last decade alone, more than 100 frog species new to science have been discovered in India. One of them is the Kalinga cricket frog (Minervarya kalinga), a plain-looking…
With its long, scaly body and delicate, veil-like fins, the Gollum snakehead captured quite some attention when discovered last year in south India. Now, scientists have found that it is…
If it's bright-hued birds you prefer watching, you'd barely look at a Nilgiri pipit twice. Moreover, the bird can be difficult to spot: the drab-coloured tones on its small, streaked…
Some butterflies go to any lengths to make ant-friends. Their caterpillars have evolved button-like spots on their backs to spout sugary rewards to attract ants; a special gland in their…
Scientists are undivided on the need to conserve natural habitats to maintain biodiversity, but divided on which ones to prioritise: intact wild habitats, or fragmented, degraded lands that are becoming…
To anyone else, the dried herb pressed neatly into crisp white paper would have been just another herbarium specimen. But for scientists at the Indian Institute for Science Education and…
It was October 2013. Armed with special permission, researcher Dinal Samarasinghe was peering at preserved animal specimens at Kolkata's Zoological Survey of India. While the ZSI is a repository of…
Leopards are what ecologists call 'generalists'. These big cats can thrive in a wide range of habitats – from lush, undisturbed evergreen forests to sugarcane fields and other human-dominated landscapes…
Wild tigers are hard to study. That's why India's tiger census uses camera traps to take photographs of tigers as they walk unsuspectingly by; geneticists pick up tiger poop or…
The sun beat down mercilessly. Being in the vicinity of south India's highest peak, in one of the coldest months – December – made no difference. After a tiring morning…
