The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Capturing ‘Secret Lives’ at IISc.

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Monday, Oct 06, 2008
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Capturing ‘Secret Lives’ at IISc.

Divya Gandhi

Book on institute’s biodiversity to be released in December

Bangalore: “Were these pictures really taken at IISc.?” Avid photographer Natasha Mhatre, who just completed her Ph.D. at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.), is frequently asked this question by bewildered friends about her collection of wildlife photographs.

Indeed, not many know that the diminutive slender loris inhabits the canopy on the 450-acre campus or that partridge’s nest in its grassland, or that 12 snake species live in the undergrowth.

It is only fitting therefore that Ms. Mhatre should name her coffee table book on biodiversity in IISc. as “Secret Lives”.

The pictorial book, to be released in December to coincide with the institute’s centenary celebrations, will be one of the first publications of the IISc. Press established early this year.

“The easiest thing would have been to make checklists of the animals and birds on the campus. But I wanted to tell stories of the processes that shape these creatures, how they live, what they eat, how they raise their young ones,” Ms. Mhatre says.

So, the firefly’s aerial displays, the rat snake’s combat dance, the blue fungus colonising a fallen log and a fruit bat family looking rather at home in the roof of the Physics Department are captured through the sharp lens of a biologist who also has the sensibility of a storyteller.

The book contains some interesting nuggets of information: we learn how a kingfisher has to overcome the confusing reflections and refractions of water as it dives for fish and how male wood spiders risk their life when they court the much larger female, which often eats its suitors mistaking them for prey.

Ms. Mhatre’s two years of work for the book took her to some unexplored nooks at the IISc.

She describes how she trudged through knee-high grass looking for an elusive insect, crouched by a pond for hours waiting for a rare bird, and even befriended a family of mongooses as she followed their lives.

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