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The Latest Breaking News from the Wildlife Institute of India

The Golden Jackal: How India's Most Adaptable Canid Thrives at the Edge of Every Growing City

A canid that predates every city it now bordersThe golden jackal, Canis aureus, has been documented across the Indian subcontinent for thousands of years, but its relationship with Indian cities is not ancient, it is opportunistic and recent, shaped by the specific way Indian urban sprawl works. Where a forest…

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Indian Wolf: How One of the World's Most Genetically Distinct Wolf Species Survives India's Open Grassland

A Lineage That Branched Off Before Europe Had WolvesA 2021 study published in the journal Molecular Ecology placed the Indian wolf's divergence from the broader wolf lineage at somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000 years ago. That predates the arrival of grey wolves in Europe and North America. Every wolf you…

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India's Only Striped Hyena Eats Anthrax-Laden Carcasses and Keeps Disease From Spreading Across the Wild

The stomach that stops an outbreakThe striped hyena has the most acidic digestive system of any land mammal studied, a gastric pH that drops as low as 1.7, comparable to concentrated battery acid. A 2017 paper published in the journal Integrative Zoology confirmed that this acidity allows hyenas to neutralise…

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Why Rhesus Macaques Thrive on Human Food in Indian Cities and What Reduces Conflict

The biology that makes rhesus macaques so good at city lifeRhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) are dietary generalists, which is the single most important fact about them. Where a specialist frugivore needs intact forest, a rhesus monkey can extract nutrition from chapati scraps, temple prasad, market waste, and raw sugarcane with…

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What India Loses When the Pangolin Vanishes: Soil Health, Termite Surges, and Biodiversity at Risk

A Pangolin Digs About 200 Burrows in Its LifetimeThe Indian pangolin (Manis crassicaudata) is a burrowing insectivore that can excavate tunnels up to 3.5 metres deep. Each burrow aerates compacted earth, creates drainage channels, and deposits the animal's nitrogen-rich droppings at depth, a kind of involuntary composting that improves soil…

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India's Asiatic Wild Buffalo Is Losing Its Genetic Identity to Domestic Cattle Interbreeding

The animal most people think they knowThe Asiatic wild buffalo (Bubalus arnee) is not the domesticated water buffalo pulling a plough through a paddy field. It is a separate species, larger, faster, and genetically distinct from the domestic buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) that Indian farmers have kept for thousands of years.…

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The Malabar Giant Squirrel Is India's Most Reliable Indicator of Forest Fragmentation

A squirrel that cannot cross a roadThe Malabar giant squirrel (Ratufa indica) is the largest squirrel in India, stretching up to one metre from nose to tail tip. It spends almost its entire life in the upper canopy, leaping gaps of up to six metres between trees, and descends to…

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India's Grassland Birds Are Disappearing Faster Than Any Other Species, And Most Indians Have Never Seen Them

The Birds Nobody PhotographsAsk any Indian wildlife photographer what they shoot most and you will hear tigers, leopards, kingfishers. The grasslands barely register. Yet India's semi-arid and dry grassland belt, stretching across Rajasthan, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, and the Deccan plateau, holds a suite of bird species found nowhere else on…

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India's Indian Softshell Turtle Is One of the Most Endangered Freshwater Reptiles in Its Own Rivers

A Reptile Built for Rivers, Stranded by ThemThe Indian softshell turtle, Nilssonia gangetica, can grow to over 70 centimetres and weigh close to 25 kilograms. Its shell is not the hard dome most people picture. It is a flattened, leathery pad, cartilaginous rather than bony, that lets the animal slip…

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The Nilgiri Tahr Is Found Nowhere Else on Earth: What Endemism Means for Its Survival in India

A mountain goat with no second homeThe Nilgiri Tahr, Nilgiritragus hylocrius, occupies roughly 400 square kilometres of montane grassland called sholas, scattered across the upper Western Ghats between Tamil Nadu and Kerala. No other wild population exists anywhere else on the planet. Unlike the Himalayan Tahr or the Arabian Tahr,…

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Beyond Tigers: How the Sundarbans' Tidal Mangrove Web Keeps Asia's Largest Forest Alive

The Mud Is the EngineThe Sundarbans sits across roughly 10,000 square kilometres of the Bengal delta, where the Ganga, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers meet the Bay of Bengal. Twice a day, tidal water floods the forest floor and retreats, depositing silt and carrying nutrients. This cycle, not the trees, not…

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India's Himalayan Wildlife Is Climbing Higher as Temperatures Rise, What the Surveys Show

What the surveys are actually recordingA 2020 study published in the journal Global Change Biology, drawing on decades of bird census data from the western Himalayas, found that high-altitude species had shifted their ranges upward by an average of 75 to 150 metres over a 20-year period. That number sounds…

Times Life

Kashmir Hangul Deer Is Critically Endangered: The Conservation Crisis India Cannot Afford to Ignore

A Species Reduced to a Single ValleyThe Hangul (Cervus hanglu hanglu) is the only surviving subspecies of the Kashmir stag, a large deer whose antlers can carry up to sixteen tines, more than almost any cervid on the subcontinent. It once ranged across the forests of Himachal Pradesh, parts of…

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How Humpback Whale Song Dialects Shift Over Decades and What Cultural Transmission Tells Us

The Song That Crosses an OceanIn 1998, marine biologist Michael Noad and his colleagues at the University of Queensland documented something that had no clean explanation at the time. Two humpback whales off the east coast of Australia were singing a song-type that belonged to the west coast population, a…

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What India's Cheetah Reintroduction at Kuno National Park Has Taught Science About Rewilding a Predator

The biology that made this harder than anyone admitted publiclyThe African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) is not the same animal as the Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus) that once ranged across India. The subspecies diverged genetically tens of thousands of years ago. When the Wildlife Institute of India and the National…

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Olive Ridley and Leatherback Turtles Both Choose Indian Shores for Nesting, What Our Coastline Reveals

The Two Turtles, Side by SideAn adult Olive Ridley weighs around 45 kilograms. An adult Leatherback can weigh over 900 kilograms, roughly the mass of a small car. These are not variations on the same animal. They are, in almost every measurable way, opposites that happen to share an order.The…

Times Life

Irrawaddy Dolphins of Chilika Lake: India's Rarest Cetacean in Brackish Waters

A Dolphin That Defies Easy ClassificationRoughly 150 Irrawaddy dolphins live in Chilika Lake, making this the largest known population of the species in any single enclosed water body on earth. They are not the acrobatic, open-ocean dolphins of wildlife documentaries. Orcaella brevirostris, the Irrawaddy dolphin's scientific name, has a blunt,…

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How the Pench-Kanha Wildlife Corridor Did More for Tigers Than Decades of Conservation Alone

The problem with a perfect fenceKanha Tiger Reserve has been protected since 1955. Pench since 1977. For decades, both reserves ran camera-trap surveys, anti-poaching patrols, and strict buffer-zone rules. Tiger numbers inside each park held steady, then grew modestly. But the populations were not truly recovering, they were holding. A…

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Times Life

India's Rarest Wildcat, the Caracal, Is Quietly Surviving in Places Nobody Predicted

A Cat That Refused to DisappearThe last confirmed caracal sighting in many Indian states happened so long ago that field biologists stopped budgeting for them. Then camera traps started catching something unexpected: a medium-sized feline with tufted black ears and a tawny, unmarked coat moving through the rocky scrublands of…

Times Life

The Rusty-Spotted Cat Is India's Smallest Wild Feline and Almost Nobody Knows It Exists

Smaller Than Your Kitten, Deadlier Than You'd ExpectThe rusty-spotted cat (Prionailurus rubiginosus) weighs between 0.9 and 1.6 kilograms at full adult size. A domestic cat typically weighs three to five kilograms. This wild feline fits in a human hand and would lose a size comparison to most Indian street kittens.…

Times Life

India's Most Secretive Feline: What Science Has Actually Documented About the Clouded Leopard

A Cat That Rewrote the Anatomy of ClimbingThe clouded leopard's canine teeth are the longest, relative to skull size, of any living cat on earth. That single biological fact has been confirmed, measured, and published, and it is one of the few things about this animal that science can state…

Times Life

India's Golden Mahseer Is Critically Endangered: What Is Killing Uttarakhand's Freshwater Giant

The Fish That Ruled India's RiversTor putitora, the golden mahseer, can reach 2.75 metres in length and weigh over 54 kg, making it one of the largest freshwater fish in Asia. It belongs to the cyprinid family, the same broad group as carp, but there is nothing ordinary about it.…

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India's Fishing Communities and Dolphins: A Coastal Coexistence Passed Down Through Generations

The Dolphins That Follow the NetsIn Chilika Lake, Odisha's vast brackish lagoon, Irrawaddy dolphins and fishermen have developed a working rhythm that marine biologists have studied for decades. The dolphins herd fish toward the shore and toward the nets. The fishermen, reading the dolphins' movement, cast at the right moment.…

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How Sundarbans Tigers Evolved Swimming, Saltwater Adaptation and Predation Habits No Other Tiger Has

A Tiger That Drinks Salt WaterEvery other tiger population on Earth drinks fresh water. The Sundarbans tigers, living across roughly 10,000 square kilometres of tidal mangrove forest straddling the India-Bangladesh border, regularly drink water with salinity levels that would cause severe dehydration in most large mammals. A 2011 study by…

Times Life

Jim Corbett National Park's Wildlife Goes Far Beyond Tigers: Biodiversity, Birds, and Mammals

The Forest That Existed Before the Tiger Became a SymbolJim Corbett National Park was established in 1936 as Hailey National Park, making it India's first national park. The tigers came with it, but they were never the only reason the Ramganga river valley mattered. The park sits at the foothills…

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