Sandhya Sekar

About

Sandhya Sekar is Programme Director at Mongabay India. She has been a freelance science writer since 2013, writing regularly for Indian and international news portals including the BBC, New Scientist, Science, Nature India and The Scientist. She started as an intern with Mongabay in 2013, and later joined at Programme Manager of the newly started India bureau in 2017. She lives in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

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19 stories

Journalists Aishwarya Mohanty and Divya Vilvaraj on the set of Walking Against the Heat, a film produced as part of the Video Reporting Opportunity by All Living Things Environment Film Festival and Mongabay-India. Image courtesy of Aishwarya Mohanty and Divya Vilvaraj.

Taking environmental storytelling beyond the screen in 2025

Sandhya Sekar 26 Dec 2025

To find out how well the toads themselves recognise mating colour signals, researchers recorded the skin colours of toads gathered at a rock pool and fed the data into a computer model that simulated toad vision, revealing they could easily detect the contrast between yellow males and the brown females. Image by Susanne Stückler and Doris Preininger.

Male toads get a monsoon makeover to stand out from the crowd

Sandhya Sekar 23 Oct 2025

Striped tigers congregate in Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Maharashtra. Image by Dr. Raju Kasambe via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Why are butterflies migrating across the Indian peninsula? [Explainer]

Sandhya Sekar 12 Aug 2025

Almost Famous species: the wild side of 2020 from forest to backyard

Sandhya Sekar 1 Jan 2021

[Interview] Turning to science to find innovative solutions: plant biologist E. V. Soniya

Sandhya Sekar 20 Nov 2020

Natural history notes from nature’s frontlines in India, for 2019

Sandhya Sekar 30 Dec 2019

What is seagrass?

Sandhya Sekar 4 Jun 2019

Female seagrass flowers uncoil to reach pollen in undersea saga

Sandhya Sekar 4 Jun 2019

New-frog-species-1

A ‘mysterious’ new frog species with hidden spots and an insect-like call

Sandhya Sekar 20 Feb 2019

All creatures great and small: Best of Almost Famous species 2018

Sandhya Sekar 2 Jan 2019

(Commentary) Workplace well-being within ecology and conservation academic circles in India

Sandhya Sekar 12 Dec 2018

A blood-red, snake-like burrowing fish from Meghalaya

Sandhya Sekar 8 Nov 2018

[Photo-feature] Meet the new species of dragon lizards from the Western Ghats

Sandhya Sekar, Visuals by Saunak Pal and S. P. Vijayakumar 26 Oct 2018

[Commentary] Hot and dry: What plants do when pushed to their very limits

Sandhya Sekar 17 Oct 2018

When drought and extreme heat strike forests at the same time

Sandhya Sekar 17 Oct 2018

Novel ‘begging’ behaviour observed in bonnet macaques at Bandipur

Sandhya Sekar 10 May 2018

[Video] Tree crickets turn leaves into megaphones to attract mates

Sandhya Sekar 4 Jan 2018

The Eastern Ghats yield two new species of large geckos

Sandhya Sekar 14 Dec 2017

Sykes’s lark: The male with more voices gets the mate

Sandhya Sekar 6 Dec 2017

News and Inspiration from Nature's Frontline.

A stretch of Mumbai's coastal road being constructed near the Haji Ali Durgah in 2024. Representative image by Qiw007 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).