India is a mega-biodiverse nation. It is home to 7-8% of the recorded species of the world. Its marine ecosystems are equally biodiverse: of the 32 animal phyla known to…
Uma Mani, in her 50s, is a Chennai-based self-taught artist. She used to paint tulips and roses until 2010, the year in which she learned about coral reefs in Juan…
Beneath the current crisis that is brewing in the Lakshadweep, there is another unspoken crisis unfolding that threatens the very habitability of the islands, and calls into question the fevered…
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…
Cyclonic disturbances between April and May in the Bay of Bengal caused massive destruction in West Bengal and Bangladesh in the form of Amphan in May this year. However, they…
Hardly three months have gone by since a special protection force assigned by the administration of Union Territory of Lakshadweep seized 1716 sea cucumbers from an uninhabited island named Suhali. Weighing 882…
Reefs do not come to mind when one thinks of India’s coastline as coral reef establishments are limited to the waters around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, Palk Bay…
Record high oceanic temperatures triggered an unprecedented global-scale coral bleaching event from 2014 to 2017, which was the longest-lasting and most severe. More than 75 percent of the world’s tropical…
Off the coast of Red Skin Island in the Andamans, it was a colourful world that marine biologist Vardhan Patankar dived into in the summer of 2016. Here, corals wore…
“The most extreme thing about the ocean is its sheer, inconceivable size. In that enormous volume – the biggest habitat on earth – lives a kaleidoscope of animals, plants, microbes…
Restoration of seabird populations can help quicker recovery of reefs following bleaching events, finds a study on coral reefs around the Chagos archipelago in the central Indian Ocean, which were…
Coral reefs in the Gulf of Mannar (GoM), off the coast of Tamil Nadu in southern India, seem to be recovering after a mass coral bleaching event in 2017. At…
Bright blue-and-yellow melon butterflyfish (Chaetodon trifasciatus) that exclusively feed on corals, tweak the way they eat, to survive on bleached reefs of the Lakshadweep archipelago, in the Arabian Sea waters,…
The Great Nicobar Island is located further south than Kanyakumari and is closer to Myanmar and Sumatra than to the Indian mainland. Over millennia of evolution and isolation, the island…