In a Goa forest next to a stream filled with shadowy vegetation, naturalist and wildlife photographer Parag Rangnekar was in hot pursuit of dragonflies when he stumbled upon a new species. He named it Idionyx Gomantakensis. In a topography far from the coastal paradise, Shashank Dalvi and Per Alström were conducting bird recordings of the common Plain-backed Thrush in Arunachal Pradesh. They realised that the ones above the tree line had a harsher note compared to their brethren below. This was the clue that led to the discovery of a new bird species, the Himalayan Forest Thrush, in January this year—the fourth new bird species to be discovered in India since 1949 and the first one in a decade. These little discoveries imbue nature lovers and the scientific community with hope, especially in the prevailing atmosphere of gloom and doom of many species having exited planet Earth.
Rangnekar, Dalvi and Alström are not the only ones. Last month, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray’s 19-year-old son Tejas, a second-year arts student, who is passionate about exploring forests and documenting the flora and fauna, discovered a new species of crabs and named it Gubernatoriana thackerayi. He also found four other crab species near Sawantwadi in Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg district.
Starting this year, in the Shendurney Wildlife Sanctuary in Thenmala, Kerala, the tufted white royal butterfly was found, while in the evergreen forests of far-off Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, the 24 mm Andaman bush toad came to be known to mankind.
Reports of discoveries of new species have been coming in from all parts of the world. In August last year, a new species of Titi monkey was discovered in a remote Peruvian forest, as well as a centimetre-long toad in Brazil and 13 spiders in Australia. According to a recent World Wildlife Fund report, Hidden Himalayas: Asia’s Wonderland, between 2009 and 2014, at least 211 new species have been discovered in the Eastern Himalayas, which spans Nepal, Bhutan, northeast India, southeast Tibet and northern Myanmar. To the latter’s credit was also the 2010 discovery of a snub-nosed monkey, known also as a sneezing monkey. New plants from 35 families, a beautiful blue-eyed frog, a pit viper, the Spotted Wren-babbler and a snake head fish that breathes and can survive on land for up to four days, represent some of the ceaseless influx of species to our catalogue of life forms. Scientists think we still have 10 million species to discover, five times more than is already known. Truly, we are far from understanding the entirety of nature’s web.
Indian scientists and researchers have been contributing to the world tally with discoveries of birds, arachnids, odonata and reptiles. Many of them are young and dedicated, worthy claimants to Nehru’s ‘scientific temper’. Zeeshan Mirza’s interest in reptiles and arachnids goes back to the time he was in college. Now a research associate with the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, discovering new species seems to be his favourite pastime. The recent discovery of a scorpion species, Thaicharmus guptai, belonging to the toxic scorpion family Buthidae in Tripura, took his total to 27. “Last November, I was in Tripura engaged in field work with the objective of photographing, collecting and documenting specimens when we came across a new species of scorpion. We named the find (also found in Goa and Thailand) Thaicharmus guptai in honour of Atul Kumar Gupta, principal conservator of forests in Tripura, who lent us unstinting support,” recalls the 28-year-old.
Last year, he launched a paid app, a guide to scorpions in India. “The only literature available on these predatory arachnids was a compilation by British zoologist Reginald Innes Pocock in 1900, with the Zoological Society of India (ZSI) bringing out a book in 1983, which was very technical. The app was created to make scorpion studies popular,” says Zeeshan. He is ready to thrust another discovery into the world, a snake genus from Gujarat.
From one predator to another, as elusive as it is beautiful, of a life spent in shady places. Damselflies and dragonflies had captivated C G Kiran for long. In May 2013, he made frequent trips to Ponmudi, a hill station in Kerala, to look for dragonflies and damselflies; the fruits of this search would make its way into a book about odonata, carnivorous insects encompassing dragonflies (Anisoptera) and damselflies, which was up for publishing. “In May that year, we came across this new species of damselfly in a single stream at Kallar-Ponmudi. Of the 10 species of the genus Protosticta selys (which the new find belongs to), seven had been reported from the Western Ghats. We had photographed many of them and realised that one in particular looked a bit different from others. Upon investigation, we were rewarded with a new species, which we named Protosticta ponmudiensis,” recalls Kiran.
The management graduate is now working exclusively on dragonflies and nature conservation education. Not much was known about dragonflies until Frederic Charles Fraser, an English entomologist, surveyed Indian dragonflies in 1930. In 1978, Hollander G Peter discovered a new species called Kerala Dartlet (Agriocnemis keralensis) from Thiruvananthapuram. “Protosticta ponmudiensis is the first damselfly to be discovered in Kerala by an Indian after 1930, which suggests that more research is needed,” says the 38-year-old .
Kiran shares his passion with Rangnekar, who has been documenting and photographing dragonflies from Goa for the last seven years. Rangnekar believes that of the 22 species recorded by ZSI, there are many waiting to be accorded the ‘new species discovery’ tag. Identification based only on photographs was difficult, and during a field trip, the dragonfly specimens were caught and put under a microscope until one was conclusively identified as a new species. What was unique about the new dragonfly was that instead of sitting upright, it preferred to hang from the vegetation. “For five years, I networked sending a specimen to K A Subramanian, an expert at ZSI, until we were one hundred per cent sure that it was a new species. To establish a new species, only one specimen will not do. Moreover, both the male and female have to be found. It took me five years from the initial discovery in 2008 to find a female,” says the 40-year-old, who named it Idionyx gomantakensis, an ode to Goa’s old name. The state has tremendous potential for many more discoveries, believes Rangnekar, as it represents the transition phase between north and south Sahyadris.
Any discovery is exciting, more so when it is a first. In the case of Ashish Tiple, assistant professor at Vidyabharti College, Seloo, Wardha in Maharashtra, it was his first reptile discovery. A PhD in butterfly ecology, Tiple has many discoveries (dragonflies) to his credit. He and his student Parag Dandge had been conducting field surveys at the Navegaon Bandh National Park, Bhandara, Maharashtra, when they came across a gecko. “Its description didn’t match the existing species. We researched, and discovered a species of the rupicolous gecko (genus Hemidactylus), a type of lizard usually found in warm climes. In 2014, our findings were printed in the Russian Journal of Herpetology,” says Tiple. He named it Hemidactylus hemchandrai, in the memory of Dandge’s father.
It looked like the genus Hemidactylus was to be richer by another species, and it was the good fortune of scientists Varad B Giri and B H Channakeshava Murthy, who have discovered many species, to have found it. Giri, a herpetology expert, has a snake (Dendrepahis girii) and gecko (Cnemaspis girii) named after him. While examining the reptile collection at ZSI, Kolkata, Giri came across a jar filled with large geckos from Chhattisgarh. The collection piqued his interest as he thought that the specimens labelled Hemidactylus giganteus did not correspond with the species as instead of the uniform granular scales on the back and tail, it had tubercles. Suspecting it to be an undescribed species, Giri requested Murthy, head of the herpetology section, to visit Chhattisgarh and collect samples. “I went to Kanker. After scouting the area, we managed to find it on a hillock,” recalls 50-year-old Murthy.
DNA studies and detailed morphological analysis of the samples were proof that it was a discovery. It was named Hemidactylus yajurvedi after Murthy’s guide and professor in Mysore University. “After the trek to locate the gecko, I stopped at a tea house in Charma. I was surprised to see a member of the new species there,” laughs Murthy. He is full of praise for ZSI as “nowhere on earth do we have such a vast and wonderful collection of specimens. We have done our bit to unearth a new species; now it is for others to study its behaviour, life cycle, etc”.
For Giri, the discovery was exhilarating as the study of amphibians and reptiles, the ‘less charismatic’ species, had been rather neglected. “We will soon publish a paper on a new genus, five new species of fan-throated lizards and a new species of a snake from India,” says Giri, a post-doctoral fellow at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, and winner of 2015 Sanctuary Asia Wildlife Service award.
For a while now, it’s been raining spiders on the west coast of India. Perhaps, Dhurv Prajapati from Gujarat could take some credit for it. While doing his master’s in Zoology from the Gujarat University, Prajapati had recorded 78 species of spiders there from a small area. His interest in arachnology took him to the Sacred Heart College, Therava, Kochi, where he is studying for his PhD under P A Sebastian, an arachnologist. Kochi also proved to be a hunting ground for the 23-year-old. “A year after I started my research, I found two rare species belonging to the genus Tropizodium, a first for India. So far only seven species have been discovered from this genus from all over the world, and this research added two more to it,” says Prajapati.
Tropizodium kalami, found in Thevara, Kochi, has been named after late President APJ Abdul Kalam, while Tropizodium viridurbium—found near village Palaj in Gandhinagar—is an ode to ‘green city’ Gandhinagar, the Latin viridurbium representing the colour green. The new findings have been published in Zootaxa, an international journal from New Zealand.
Akin to Prajapati, Javed Ahmed also has a fascination for arachnids, especially spiders, who he calls “vampires of the crawling kingdom”. Recently, he discovered two new spider species, Dictis mumbaiensis and Peucetia phantasma at Aarey Colony in Goregaon, Mumbai. “I was trying to photograph wolf spiders at Aarey Colony, notorious for leopard attacks. By chance, I saw a tiny spider that had curled into the web of another and was making a meal of it. Intrigued, I took it home and cut it open to examine the genitalia, which is like an identity card for a spider. That examination was proof that it was a new species,” says the 30-year-old English literature graduate.
If this new discovery was a plucky fellow, the other was a beautiful green spider that lives only on ghost trees, just as butterflies do on respective host plants. Ahmed dug up all the literature on the genus Peucetia, of all species found in India and the world, and when he drew a blank, he was convinced he was looking at discovery number two. With three other spider discoveries from Karnataka also chalked up to his name, Ahmed is now pursuing a master’s degree in Environmental Science.
A bird discovery is a rarity in today’s times, and the find of the Himalayan Forest Thrush is indeed a feather in India’s cap. It was named Zoothera salimalii, after the ‘birdman of India’ Salim Ali. Bird researcher Dalvi says, “Our focus was on the Plain-backed Thrush, which we noticed sounded harsher above the tree line at 4,200 metres whereas below the tree line the same species had a musical tone. Intrigued by this, our study began with researchers from China pitching in. We looked at 230 specimens across 15 museums in six countries.” Once Dalvi and Alström compared the DNA structure, they realised the Himalayan Forest Thrush differed genetically with minute morphological changes. “It was a classic example of a bird hiding in plain sight, a cryptic species discovery,” says 32-year-old Dalvi, an MSc in Wildlife Biology and Conservation.
Just as in India, events similar to the Himalayan Forest Thrush discovery also unfolded in Indonesia that it led to Sean Kelly finding a bird, the Wakatobi Flowerpecker. Says Sean, “My doctoral supervisors Nicola Marples and David Kelly from Trinity College Dublin, had been studying the geographical variation in birds across South-east Sulawesi and its offshore islands for years. Their preliminary research suggested there were differences among populations of the same species across islands. We decided to investigate it, and one of our chosen study species was the Grey-sided Flowerpecker.” With the help of photographs, DNA sequencing and morphological features, it was ascertained that the birds on the Wakatobi Island were a different species to those on mainland Sulawesi and that the populations had not inter-bred in over one million years. “Wakatobi Flowerpecker was the name assigned to the discovery, not found anywhere in the world,” says 27-year-old Sean. He hopes the discovery will boost tourism in Wakatobi Island as the people there are relatively poor.
While it is a well-deserved pat on the backs of all these scientists, there is a greater underlying message for the respective communities. Says Giri: “When you protect a species, you are protecting its habitat and eventually the vital resources for humans. With many species on their way to extinction, the new discoveries are like a chance given by nature to us to repair the damage.”
Dalvi, whose discovery was touted as a cryptic species discovery (where species have superficial similarities), believes that conservation becomes important because there might be endangered birds that we don’t know of. Ahmed says that an inventory of species in a region is important as “you cannot begin conservation until you know what you have”. Mirza spells hope for the communities concerned when he says that these discoveries light up their spirits. “We may not be able to save everything, but I am going to do my bit to document stuff and put it before the world. We should secure our protected areas, and manage and document everything as well as prioritise,” sums up Mirza.