The decline of fish stock the world over is gravely affecting the balance of things in our seas. In India too, with the ever-rising, unregulated fishing, things aren’t looking too good.   Mayuresh is a PhD candidate with our Oceans and Coasts Programme and works on understanding impacts of overfishing on fish populations in India’s […]

In these two episodes, Dr Geetha Ramaswami talks about plants that have travelled far, far away from their native lands and have invaded and colonised new areas. She tells us about why and how this happens and what the ecological effects of such invasions by plants are. Tune in! In part II, she tells us […]

Have you picked up a jamun or two, or seen an amaltas tree that’s still in bloom recently? Here are ten of the many trees that silently brighten up our days—even when they aren’t parading their flowers.     If you’d like to monitor a tree that you love near your home, workspace, or just […]

We humans don’t just stress each other out, sometimes elephants too are affected by our activities. And signs of this stress have been found in what might seem like a rather unlikely place—their poop!   Wildlife habitat everywhere is shrinking, and India is no exception—forests are being converted to places that aren’t as welcoming towards […]

In their bright yellow-and-blue finery, melon butterflyfish are hard to miss—you must have seen them on one of your dives. And if you’re like me, who hasn’t ever been on one, you’ve probably seen them swimming across your screen in some underwater video. These fish—the melon butterflyfish—really love being around coral, and for good reason. […]

Somewhere in a certain cranny of your home, lives a little creature that’s on the lookout for mosquitoes and flies. She’s spinning up some of the strongest known natural fibres to trap these insects that often keep us up at night by singing terrible tunes right into our ears. She’s none other than your friendly […]

If you watch birds for long enough (and even a few minutes every other day counts), you will quickly learn to tell them apart by their size and shape—and even more easily so by the colours they sport. Today, as we dive deeper and deeper into the digital world, we associate colours with their CMYK […]

Rucha Karkarey is a research scholar with the Oceans and Coasts Programme at NCF.  She has spent the last seven years stalking groupers (these really interesting fish) underwater, trying to understand how they are coping with climate-change. She took over our Instagram for a week, and shared stories about curious behaviours of groupers from her fieldwork in […]

Our early warning systems—which inform people about the presence of elephants to avoid surprise encounters—have now been set up in Gudulur, Tamil Nadu! NCF’s M Ananda Kumar and his team have been running these systems in Valparai, Tamil Nadu, since 2002, in collaboration with local people, plantation companies, and the Tamil Nadu Forest Department. In […]

The natural world is magical. And if you’ve spent even a little time by a clear, whispering river as you patter your bare feet on smooth pebbles, or watched a spider delicately weave its web as it glistens with dew and trembles gently in the wind, or experienced the deep sense of calm that observing […]