Invert life

 I have recently been trying to work on the draft for a book that serves as a simple introduction to observing insects in India. Keeping it short is a REAL struggle! In wrangling with my thoughts I have tried to keep it short and reduce polemics! And yet.... Anyway, I do not know how much of it I might have to trim out. Here is an uncensored draft for a section (that may or may not have a place in that book!). I have tried feeding it to AI to rework sections but nothing was satisfactory. Unautomated human feedback and gut reactions are welcome. 

How and what do we know about the insects of India

If you took a picture of any insect in say England or in any country in western Europe and posted it on the iNaturalist website, you will probably see it being identified to species within a couple of days. If you tried the same with an insect from India, the situation would be quite different. You might get the identification to family level, sometimes to the genus and most likely no further. You might see an expert who deals with just that family or group and comment that your photo likely represents an undescribed species or that specimens would be needed. This difference in knowledge availability (of just a narrow taxonomic kind) on local life forms has been variously attributed to historic influences that include a supposed cultural abhorrence for killing, a lack of support for curiosity-based questioning, the difficulties of maintaining reference collections in the humid tropics, the lack of learned societies (amid a caste- and class- fragmented elite within a largely unequal and oppressed society), or other factors placed under the rather large umbrella of colonialism. Overall, we can agree that historic forces have played a role in our collective ignorance of the smaller life-forms around us.

People posting photos to a place like iNaturalist expect the name of an insect. Typically this is a Latin binomial as the large majority of insects do not have species specific names in English or even other languages. Names in Indian languages for some groups have been contrived but are these are unlikely to be established unless there is a multi-generational culture of study and use among sufficient numbers of speakers of that language. The naming of insects under the binomial system depends on institutions such as natural history museums, collections in universities, specialists supported by universities and their libraries. Historically, the idea of collecting species, pinning them with labels and giving them a binomial name rose to popularity among the upper classes with large homes, with both fashion and religion playing roles. Wealthy collectors with leisure maintained private cabinets of curiosity and admiring the variety of organisms was seen as a form of admiration of God’s wisdom. The growth of colonialism made the major capitals of Europe the centres for harvesting and centralizing specimens from around the world, through a network that included native collectors, colonial officials, ship captains and natural history traders. All this was also aided by the growth of Learned Societies, the printing industry, and the growth of a class of people with leisure. This largely private industry involving wealthy individual amateurs gradually became more inclusive, shifting down the wealth-class of its participants, with the growth of public-funded museums, universities, research institutions, and specialization in the biological sciences. Today, the old-fashioned taxonomists quest for describing new species is looked down upon as a form of “stamp-collecting” and most modern institutional researchers examine speciation in an evolutionary light and describe new species mostly as a side effect of that study process. Curiosity and biophilia however are still a common connecting thread.

The seemingly easy act of giving a binomial name and categorizing an insect is based on the slow and irregular accretion of thousands of specimens by thousands of individuals (sometimes through a chain of hands - a field collector who passes it on to another and so on) over more than two centuries with specimens in institutions acting as a memory safeguard along with publications held in libraries, allowing verifiability across generations of humans. The act of formally describing species involves inventing words for the anatomy and morphology of insects which slowly become standardized according to rules. Specialists aired and exchanged ideas available in print across time and space through their writings in journals, so libraries have had a major role, and the socio-cultural role of public libraries, societies, universities, and museums cannot be down-played.

Economics drives the study of insects in some ways. The colonial Indian experience with famines and epidemics led to support for research in agriculture and public health. Some groups of insects have had studies supported by institutions begun in British India. In that period, it was generally understood that the key was in finding a weak link in the life-history that could be made use of in management practices. This encouraged the application of natural history observations and biological research techniques. Much of that research happened in an age when insecticides did not exist or were still limited in their efficiency. Today, potent non-selective insecticides are used in prophylactic sprays, killing indiscriminately with extreme efficiency, posing long-term dangers that are either overlooked or deliberately hidden. The possibility for mindless use of such chemicals, often supported by a powerful chemical industry lobby has reduced support for the need to study insects. It has also reduced the “value” of the little collective entomological expertise that was developed in the past.

An obsession with economic growth hinders curiosity-driven education and research. The study of local insects and indeed the observational study of most other life forms has not had sufficient support. Much of the teaching in India is old-fashioned and based on syllabi and textbooks, rather than being driven by questions and curiosity. Curiosity from outside academia has few places to go. India with its siloed academic spaces limiting interdisciplinary research and a class- and caste-ridden academic hierarchy that seeks to rise and separate itself from the general public, perhaps predictably, fares poorly in locally-rooted research. The reward system drives academics to seek repute mostly among western peers since there is often insufficient critical mass within any field of science within the country.

Against this backdrop of limited support from specialists within the country, there has been a ground up movement enabled by the internet and there has been a growth in amateur interest among certain classes. Self-organized groups on Facebook, WhatsApp and systems like iNaturalist with thousands of participants are mostly ignored by public-funded research and education institutions in India. While these have done a great deal for education, these internet platforms are without problems. There have been cases of opportunistic prospecting for new species and there are many who indulge in what has been called “helicopter research”. The National Biodiversity Act was created to protect against it but much of it is unimplementable, given the forces involved in making laws, and the poverty of expertise in the bureacracy. Fortunately for ordinary Indian citizens, the constitution says it is the fundamental duty of every citizen “to develop the scientific temper” and that should in theory keep us safe.

When Carl Linnaeus established the system of binomial nomenclature, he believed that every species had been created by god and that there must be a finite number of them. The idea that species were created by a god effectively ended in 1859 with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Today, it is rather unfortunate that most biology teachers avoid debate on creation and evolution that would require the questioning of religion and tradition. The study of life forms around you is an active form of learning and we should re-examine any passively received ideas we may have.

Now the study of insects is certainly not limited to giving them a binomial name. That is just the first step, an aid to allow people to study and compare notes on what they think is the same entity. Learning more about the life of the insect on your own can be incredibly challenging and also very thrilling. This is an area where ordinary people have an edge over museum specialists in far-away locations. Specimen identification based on reference collections often relies on the forms of adult insects, often in damaged and discoloured conditions. In the vast majority, the immature stages are completely unknown. There are an infinite number of ways in which one can examine insects and what they do. There is no shortage of them and they are endlessly fascinating in the diversity of form and habits. They are the most significant herbivores on the planet and have altered the way plants live. Their study can have applications in other fields – people have studied them to make computers more reliable, systems more resilient, looked at their colors and structures for inspired applications in chemistry and physics. Being easy indicators of ecology, they are indicators of changes around us, and yet we have a studied ignorance of these – the smaller majority – of life forms around us.

Afroalpine wanderings

This might be a rare divergence in genre from my regular posts in being about travel. Travel of this kind is a rather rare event for me and I had almost decided not to write it here but then felt it might be something I might want to be able to be able locate more easily for myself in the future. The Wikimedia Foundation held Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi and I was fortunate to have been selected to attend with support. It was held in a wealthy ghetto of Nairobi, isolated in a high-security hotel complex, and I suspect many of the attendees hardly saw what the rest of Kenya really is. Along with another participant, Manoj Karingamadathil, and our wonderful driver Peter, we spent about 5 days visiting Nyeri, Mt Kenya, the Aberdare National Park, and looping anticlockwise around the Aberdares through the rift valley, back via Lake Naivasha to Nairobi. One of my aims was to see the Afroalpine vegetation zone with giant lobelias and Dendrosenecio, something that more people associate with the Kilimanjaro region. 

Prior to the trip, I set myself about to learn as much Swahili as possible, and it was not really needed but certainly useful. I had decided not to go anywhere near the over-hyped and overpopulated wildlife parks. I was not even interested in the migration of wildebeest in the Masai Mara. I saw later on social media, the horrors of tourists and safari vehicles blocking animals and forcing them to leap off cliffs so that photographers could take pictures of animals splashing into the water or be taken by crocodiles just as they were shown in some NatGeo/Discovery wildlife videos.

I also spent a good deal of time examining older travels and descriptions of the Aberdare and Mount Kenya region. In the process I went about sprucing the Wikipedia entries on Samuel Teleki and Halford Mackinder. Both their expeditions have rather shocking events, Teleki and his entourage had burn Kikuyu villages and shot many. Mackinder (later a professor) and his team had casually murdered some of their porters (the final bill to the contractor merely has "shot on orders" written against them!). And then their expeditions took back numerous plants and animals which were named after them. And there are places that still bear their name in Kenya.

Lioness gherao-ed by vehicles

Just before leaving Nairobi for Nyeri, I decided to join a bunch to a somewhat overpriced safari to the Nairobi National Park. The traffic load that the park deals with is rather shocking and the behaviour of the vehicle drivers confirmed my worst about what happens elsewhere. The word "gherao" describes how the vehicles dealt with the poor lioness. We did however see some very beautiful ostriches, a black-bellied bustard, a hunting serval, and a secretary bird among many other things and the park is truly beautiful in spite of its unusual juxtaposition of wildlife with the city skyline. I noticed groups of Fiscal Shrikes following herds of zebra and swooping down to take disturbed insects after them. I was not able to find any information on this in the literature. It is perhaps fortunate that the wildlife tourist pressure can be focussed on some unfortunate sanctuaries while letting some areas be far more wild. Like in India, it seems that the plains bear a greater pressure than the hilly regions. The lack of roads is probably the biggest saviour of the wilderness. The old colonial travelogues with their slow caravans contrast so much with our rapid ability to move around. 

We made our way to Nyeri that afternoon and reached in the evening, stopping along the route many times. I later learned that the name of the town Nyeri does not exist in pre-1902 maps of east Africa and that it was coined by the ornithologically-infamous Captain Meinertzhagen who had served in the King's Africa Rifles. (PS: he is infamous otherwise also, butchered the Kikuyu and likely killed his first wife) A 1903 photograph of him in uniform was exhibited in the Nairobi National Museum. A visit to the museum earlier in the week was also quite enlightening. I had an inkling based on the amount of space spent for the bird exhibits that it had its origins in natural history and only later did I find that it was actually created by the colonial members of the East Africa Natural History Society (I had to create a Wikipedia entry for the organization!). In general the colonial impact on east Africa seemed to be so much worse than in India - with far more violence inflicted on the local people and land. The story of white wildlife preserves is also quite stark. The pricing of the larger and more popular wildlife reserves targets wealthy western tourists but I heard some happy bits from a guide that the Kenyan Wildlife Service gives out special permits for Kenyan students to visit the sanctuaries at free or reasonable prices. We saw a large bunch of (mostly) happy school children and their teachers taken for a walk from the Naro Moru gate until the Met Station and back. One hopes that more local naturalists, educators and conservationists prevail.

Some months earlier I had plowed through a machine translation of a German biography of Bernhard Grzimek (and obviously, tried to improve the English Wikipedia entry) - and the overall story was rather sad. When I was a kid in the late 1970s, my father used to bring home issues of the beautifully illustrated Das Tier, a German predecessor of the BBC Wildlife Magazine that the Max Mueller Bhavan in Bangalore (then located in an old bungalow on Museum Road decorated with a large Araucaria and Balan Nambiar installations) used to receive. It was one of the popular creations of Grzimek (sadly there seem to be no digital archives of this amazing work) and when I went to university, I found his Animal Encyclopedia a fascinating work. By some oversight I only noticed much later that the venue of Wikimania was right across the road from a school named after Michael Grzimek. One presumes that a large donation was made by BG to them. The Grzimek biography ends with the highly questionable and unusually large amount of wealth that he had accumulated through his life and the family squabbles and tragedies that had followed after his death. 

Nyeri was a welcome escape from Nairobi and a visit to the Baden Powell memorial, although not a fan of the man, revealed a somewhat unexpected surprise. I am sure it was well known but I had missed it in my research and the grave of Jim Corbett cropped up rather unexpectedly. I knew that Corbett moved to Africa after Indian Independence and had known of his exploits in the nearby Aberdare range which resulted in his last book "Treetops" and his rather famous quip on the freshly minted Queen Elizabeth. Interestingly the Bible quote used on the memorial is exactly the same one used on his mother's grave in Nainital (photo - remembering a very rainy monsoon day in Nainital) - presumably chosen by his sister Maggie.  

Nearby was another large grave - that of Gray Leakey - a cousin of Louis Leakey. The horrific story behind it was known to the local guide but was new to me - and so, naturally, I later created a Wikipedia entry at Gray Leakey. Overall, it seems that the Mau-mau uprising needs a complete retelling in a post-colonial analysis and voice. There is a rather under-appreciated museum at Nyeri that looks at local history and the independence movement. We visited the General Karibu caves area and the surrounding countryside, filled with streams fed by the glaciers on Mount Kenya - the real reason for Nyeri's agricultural wealth and much of the colonial settlement.

Entrance to the dining room in Treetops

The Aberdare National Park is an incredibly large reserve and is undoubtedly the place for any naturalist to visit. Somehow the idea of a mountain range in Africa came as a surprise to me. Whereas roads in Indian hill regions tend to become highly twisted their the obligatory hair-pin bends, the roads in the Aberdares are surrounding regions are laid remarkably straight and as one moves from here to the rift valley, the changes in altitude are so gradual. We entered the Aberdares from the Treetops gate - named after an establishment that was patronised by Corbett. The moment one enters at dawn, one is entertained with the amazing sounds of the African forest - the almost electronic-surround-soun antiphonal duet call of a boubou combined with numerous Apalis, Tauraco, Cisticola and other unidentified species. The tops of the Aberdares have shola-like grasslands, termed there as moorlands. Along the way one encounters thick Hagenia (a rather delicate Rosaceae with almost herbaceous looking leaflets) and Podocarpus forests, followed by tall bamboo forest. We saw an elephant on a faraway hill, a cape buffalo, and a large pig which turned out to be "Meinertzhagen's" Giant Forest Hog Hylochoerus meinertzhageni! Jackson's spurfowls were the tamest and most conspicuous roadside birds (remarkable how understudied they are in the ornithological literature). We only managed to reach as far as Chania falls before we reached the 2 pm turn-around point and the route was just stunning! I dream of a day when I will be able to make another trip with someone who knows the region, its fauna and flora, better.

Helichrysum on Aberdare's moorlands

Heath, Hagenia, Sambucus, Podocarpus etc. beside the Chania stream

 

Moss draping the Podocarpus, 
parts of the Aberdare are watered by condensation

 

Helichrysum in the foreground, a Kniphofia just visible

The most coveted visit was to the Afroalpine zone on Mount Kenya. The road from Naro Moru to the Met Station which lies on the slopes of the extinct volcano of Mount Kenya was another of those straight mountain roads - getting from 1500 m to 3050 m on a straight line (with a leopard welcoming us!).  

 

The leopard

We walked from the Naro Moru Met Station up above the tree line to see the incredible flora. Giant Lobelia and Dendrosenecio appear after a region of heath. The ground is boggy and covered in strong tussocks of grass. We were not equipped with waterproof shoes and we started a bit too late as well. The weather on the mountain is constantly changing, sun, wind, cloud, mist and all of a sudden a shower of hailstones. Lobelia gregoriana which forms beautiful rosettes holds a little bit of fluid at the centre which is apparently a frost protection adaptation. The polysaccharides produced by the plant cause ice to form at the top of the water pond which insulates the central growing tip from freeze injury. I wondered if a similar adaptation exists in the Hedyotis verticillaris of the Mukurthi region. I showed a picture of the landscape to botanist Navendu Page and he exclaimed that it was "a different planet" ... it is. We did not go into Teleki valley or see the nival zone and sadly, the glaciers on Mount Kenya appear to be doomed. The glaciers looked from the plains like flecks of white which led to the Kikuyu name of Kere-Nyaga which according to one etymology theory is related to the white feathers on an ostrich. The Kamba people called it Kima ya Kegnia, others called it Ndur (Kimaja) Kegnia and Kirenia. Somehow that gave rise to the word "Kenya."  One bleak prediction on the glaciers is that they will all be gone by 2030. With it, nobody quite knows what will happen to the streams that they fed, the lands that they water, the people involved in farming, the vegetation, and wildlife.

Heath (Erica arborea) just above the tree line

The rosette of Lobelia gregoriana with the pond

Lobelia gregoriana flowering, the flower edges are torn 
by Moorland chats (Pinarochroa sordida), pollinators

Dendrosenecio keniensis in flower

Dendrosenecio keniodendron in the background

Looking up the slope of the so-called "vertical bog"

A final goodbye to Mount Kenya

It is easy to see the effect the mountain had on the people and the ritual significance that many tribes gave to it. 

From the Rift Valley, the Aberdares on the horizon

 

Rift valley vegetation of euphorbs

We returned to Nairobi with a stopover at a typical tourist trap - Thompsons Falls. And another stopover at Lake Naivasha. We had enchanting views of Mount Longonot from the escarpment in the evening. Obviously we had just scraped the surface.

Kenya is a beautiful country for the most part but like any place there are troubles hidden underneath. There is clearly a vast wealth gap and the city of Nairobi is a cruel one with the usual signs of urban poverty. The lack of government spending on social infrastructure like public transport is glaring. The villages and smaller towns were much more cheerful looking. The Kenyan public education system has clearly delivered in the past. There were a few unfortunate sights like police extorting petty money from vehicles passing by and there were big protests that the government had suppressed with violent force. A proliferation of churches which apparently make great money indicated the general poverty of governance. Hopefully, good people will prevail and make it a better place for all, in spite of the long and deep divides of tribes, linguistics, and circumstance. 

I greatly missed my good old Lumix FZ100 which was the ideal travel camera which dealt with both macro and distant objects. Sadly, a minor electronics fault has made it unusable. Bridge cameras have unfortunately become unavailable or too expensive. I only had my mobile phone and my new Olympus OM-D EM10 but setup mostly for macro photography for which I did not have enough time. But more images can be found on iNaturalist and Wikimedia Commons - all of course on free licenses - a gallery can be found here. 

Thanks to numerous people and circumstances that made this trip possible.

Wikimedia Foundation for supporting my attendance at Wikimania Nairobi. Harish Thyagarajan for assistance with Kenya logistics and most importantly reassurance. Sugandhi for putting me in touch with Harish! Peter, our enlightened driver and local assistance - we will remember the Swahili wisdom - “Kupotea njia ndio kujua njia” [= to be lost is the way to find the way]. Martina Tichácková on iNaturalist for the alpine plant identifications. The wonderful welcoming people we met along the way, KWS guide Alex, the KWS staff at various gates. The friendly host at a tiny little restaurant in Naro Moru who found Indian snacks too spicy. Manoj for the great company!

Some wikipedia side effects
Articles created: Darwin Glacier, EANHS
Articles improved: Victor van Someren, Samuel Teleki, Halford Mackinder, Ludwig von Höhnel

A focus on the process rather than product

A few weeks back, many of us read the rather stunning case of an ant in the genus Messor from Sicily that produced two kinds of male offspring, one of them apparently of a completely different species! Given the number of eyebrows that such a finding raises, it is clear that this research took a good while before it was finally published! The complicated genetics was however not entirely unexpected. This made me wonder about the teaching of genetics in classrooms, the kind of finality and perfection that textbook concepts are made to appear like is perhaps a myth that teachers could do well to dispel early in life. Unfortunately it seems that teaching and testing in education is as fascist and authoritarian as the rest of the social environment. 

Some years ago, on a trip to Nandi Hills, I had the good fortune of being able to browse an old guest book. One of the comments that caught my attention was this one.

A little digging revealed that this was Spencer Wharton Brown, a geneticist who at that point did not even have a Wikipedia entry (of course that gap was fixed). He actually was so prominent in his time that he had the nickname "Mr Chromosome". It would appear that he must have been a visitor to the Indian Institute of Science - considering that some years later he did publish a paper with an Indian coauthor - Chandra, H. Sharat; Brown, Spencer W. (1975). "Chromosome imprinting and the mammalian X chromosome". Nature. 253 (5488). My friend Karthik Ramaswamy, then at the Archives of the IISc (now no longer an extant function!), tried to examine this a bit more.

Now Brown apparently decided to use scale insects as his model for genetics studies and was it a good choice?! In scale insects, there appears to be such stuff as post zygotic deletion of the male genome!  Sadly, Spencer Brown was murdered somewhat mysteriously!

Anyway, the lesson here seems to be that the whole system of genetic control including the influence of peptides (maternal environment), silencing RNA, epigenetics, Lamarckism, etc. calls for a more cautious approach to the teaching of biology in general. But looking at these findings should make one appreciate gene-centric views of evolution.  

• Brown, S.W. (1963) The Comstockiella system of chromosome behavior in the armored scale insects (Coccoidea:Diaspididae). Chromosoma 14:360–406. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00326785 
• Brown, Spencer W., and Giovanni DeLotto. (1950) Cytology and sex ratios of an African species of armored scale insect (Coccoidea-Diaspididae). The American Naturalist 93.873: 369-379. 
• Brown, Spencer W. (1960) Spontaneous chromosome fragmentation in the armored scale insects (Coccoïdea‐Diaspididae). Journal of Morphology 106.2: 159-185. 
• Hartl, Daniel L., and Spencer W. Brown (1970) The origin of male haploid genetic systems and their expected sex ratio. Theoretical Population Biology 1.2:165-190. 
• Ross, Laura, Ido Pen, and David M. Shuker (2010) Genomic conflict in scale insects: the causes and consequences of bizarre genetic systems. Biological Reviews 85.4:807-828. 

Swarming springtails

 

Podurid(?) springtail swarms on the forest floor

Snow fleas is a name used for collembola in the temperate zone for their swarming behavior over melting snows in spring. I do not think there is much literature on Western Ghat forest springtails and their swarming - presumably following the first summer rains (these were seen in March 2025 in Wayanad). These swarms form bluish grey dust on the ground that begins to bristle when disturbed. The swarm moves slowly on foot with some members making leaps and whole cloud like formations drift along the forest floor, presumably following the slope of the land. Remarkably little has been written about forest little organisms in the Western Ghats, even less so about such seasonal spectacles. Presumably the first rains flood the soil and leaf litter layer and flush the organisms, although it is possible that these are newly emerged and following weather cues too. 

Here are some videos of the springtails swarms in action. 

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collembola_swarming_2.webm
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collembola_swarming_3.webm
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Collembola_swarming_4.webm

Postscript

June 2025 - the rains flush out some springtails out of the soil in Bangalore too. 

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/288700709

An authorship puzzle

I posted this a long time back on Facebook with no response. The author "D.R." wrote a column on birds in the The Bombay Chronicle. Any information on the identity of the author is welcome.
 

This one is from 26 April 1949. p 6.

And another

3 January 1949

  

The author apparently died in 1950 as mentioned in a comment to the editor.