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. […]
Author: Janhavi Rajan
Q&A: Spider Insider with Vena Kapoor
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 […]
Ornithology and Graphic Design: what’s the connection?
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 […]
Super Groupers: An Instagram Series
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 […]
Elephant Early Warning Systems now in Gudulur!
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 […]
Reconnecting children with the natural world—Q&A with Suhel Quader
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 […]
Plant invaders: Q&A with Geetha Ramaswami
Geetha Ramaswami is a Research Associate at NCF, and is particularly interested in invasive plants—especially how they affect and get affected by the ecosystem they invade. What are introduced species? What are native species? Well, over many millennia, different species have evolved to live in different kinds of environments. They may not have […]
Where are elephants in Valparai? Find out on a bus!
Our Elephant Information Network has a new addition: voice announcement systems installed on government buses to alert passengers about elephant presence in the Valparai plateau. If you happen to hop onto a Government bus in Valparai in the evening, instead of that uptempo Tamil music that you were expecting though the speakers, you might be surprised […]
Q&A with Kalzang Gurmet and Tanzin Thinley
We asked our Spitian Field Coordinators (who were recently in Bangalore for a workshop) some searching questions about what it’s really like to live and work in snow leopard country. (Translated from Hindi) What got you interested in wildlife? Thinley: I was always interested in wildlife and I always loved animals. My father was known as […]
Settling on shaky ground: How dead coral structures carve the fate of young coral recruits in the Lakshadweep islands
Photographs: Shreya Yadav Illustration: Rohan Arthur For coral larvae—the free-floating progeny of adult coral—picking a perfect place to build their homes amidst the bustling crannies, alleys and turrets of reefs is ever so important, especially since once they settle, they spend their entire lives in the same place. But with sea temperatures spiralling upwards, […]