From the tales of Black Panther to White Tiger and many charming variants, explore how melanin colour codes the wild. The Dark Brown Pigment—Melanin Let me start this article with someone whom all of you know: A certain ‘Bagheera’. Yes, the ‘black panther’ from Rudyard Kipling’s masterpiece, The Jungle Book. In the book, it is Bagheera who teaches the feral boy (or ‘man cub’) Mowgli about the ‘ways of the jungle’. You may or may not have seen real-life Bagheeras in your city zoo. The first thing that may have struck you on seeing such an animal is the sheer spectacle: …

Commemorating the Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav with a brief tale of our peoples and environment from c. 1872–2022, spanning about 75 years before and after our tryst with destiny. ************************* 'Why was India lost?’ asked Mahatma Gandhi in his famous little book of philosophies, the Hind Swaraj, in 1909. Without any pun intended, he answered some lines later: ‘The English have not taken India; we have given it to them.’...

According to 2018 estimates, India has onl 2,967 tigers. Have you ever wondered how does one count tigers? What systems and mechanisms are used? How reliable are the numbers that are finally estimated and released? Most importantly, why do we count tigers? We invite children and teachers to a special Young Environmentalist MasterClass on the subject of counting of tigers with one of India’s foremost wildlife experts, Qamar Qureshi of the Wildlife Institute of India.

What tigers eat and the space they occupy protects the health of their entire ecosystem.