western-ghats

Hooded grasshoppers ( Teratodes ) are a genus of grasshoppers that are native to India and Sri Lanka. The striking characteristic of this insect is its wonderful armour-like structure, that stretches over most part of its dorsal side. This structure looks like a large, sharp hood, thus the common name, hooded grasshopper. The hood also has a serrated-looking, yellowish-orange edge, giving the grasshopper an appearance of a leaf, helping it camouflage very well in the thick undergrowth....

Monochrome in photography, by definition, is when something is depicted in varying tones of one single colour OR in just black and white. For this post, I will reference to it as the latter. I strongly believe that monochrome ( black&white ) is one of the very purest forms of image making and quite a tough one too. Being devoid of the distractions from a motley of colours, communicating the idea, the story or the thought process behind an image becomes challenging indeed....

A few weeks back was Father’s day. When my daughters wished me with a lovely card they had made, it got me thinking. There are so many hard at work dads in the natural world as well whose efforts go quite unnoticed. They carry on with their paternal duties without expecting any appreciation in return. These highly motivated and dedicated fathers deserve every bit of praise and it was time to hail them too....

The members of the ‘Tetragnathidae’ family of spiders are commonly known as the long jawed spiders. Called so because of their relatively longer mouth parts or more specifically called ‘chelicerae’, or the fangs. The other thing that distinguishes them is their first pair of legs being much longer than their second pair. These are orb-weaver spiders, building small to medium sized webs, generally suspended horizontally or at an inclination, above or close to water....

Came across this big group of individuals swimming around in a small stream in Coorg. They could easily have been mistaken for a school of fish and I did too. However, they seemed to be swimming on the water’s surface, with the upper half of their bodies outside, unlike most fish. Looking closely, realized that they weren’t fish at all, but a completely different kind of creatures. They were insects, more specifically, beetles....