Articles by Arathi Menon

Ganesh V.S. from Chowdikatte, a village in Karnataka’s Mysuru district, had lost his wife to renal failure, a little over a year after she was bitten by a snake. In…

In 1986, the Kerala forest department took a decision that they would come to regret decades later. The social forestry wing of the department raised a few saplings, planted them…

King cobra venom is less complex in its composition than the spectacled cobra venom, potentially due to the strict snakes-only diet the king cobra follows, finds a new study. The…

What does a forest mean to the forest-dwelling adivasi communities in India? Do they see forest ecosystems the way those outside the forest see it? How much of their interpretation…

A small wildcat species, the leopard cat is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List, which means it is not of immediate…

Clouded leopards have developed nuanced coexistence strategies to survive in the wild by having a peak activity time that does not overlap with other carnivores and by potentially playing “hide-and-seek”…

Elephants frequent the wet forest tract of the Wayanad plateau during summer owing to the riparian forests and swamps in the landscape that make the habitat cooler and wetter than…

Climate change, coupled with human disturbance, is pushing snow leopards further up the mountains and away from human contact, reveals a new study underscoring the importance of climate adaptive conservation…

India is home to 12.40% of the global bird diversity; 1,353 bird species out of 10,906 documented globally are from India. The country has 78 endemic bird species. Of the…

Radio collaring, a popular technology used in wildlife monitoring, has got a bad rap due to the cheetah mishaps in recent months. At least three of the nine cheetah deaths…

The Nilgiri Hills — A Kaleidoscope of People, Culture and Nature, edited by anthropologist Paul Hockings begins​ with what's now a pressing concern in the landscape, its changing nature. So…

The Global South, particularly South Asia, is far more vulnerable to climate change than the Global North and at the same time, lacks the capacity to deal with global warming…

Around 800 saplings arrived in a pickup truck at the community garden in Bengaluru’s Jakkur lake for a plantation drive, on September 8, 2023. The idea of a community garden was…

The spread of invasive species is one of the five major threats to biodiversity and ecosystem services. These animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms, that establish themselves in an environment outside…

The legacy landfill in Kodaikanal, a hill town in the Dindigul district of Tamil Nadu, caught fire about four months ago. Attempts were made to douse it but even months…

Rock bees, also called the Asian giant honey bees (Apis dorsata), have colour vision in mesopic light intensities or twilights, similar to how humans experience colour in similar light conditions,…

A long-term study to understand ways to balance conservation with religious practices, in three tiger reserves of India, has culminated in a set of comprehensive guidelines that provide concrete suggestions…

Reducing food loss and waste could improve food security but it may not necessarily lead to expected environmental benefits, according to researchers of a recent study published in Nature Food.…

It is early August and Kolar is shades of brown and green. Unexpected showers in the previous months have lifted the spirits of the farmers here. Called the land of…

Bengaluru-based photographers Harsha Narasimhamurthy and Karthik Mohan Iyer were following two tigers, Noor and T101, near Tutikenaale in Ranthambore in March 2023 when they had an extremely rare sighting of…