Nyctibatrachus karnatakaensis

Birds have always fascinated me! Sundays during my high schools were meant for birding around Shimoga city on my father’s bicycle. Thanks to my brother for his patient riding that provided ample opportunity to have a look at birds. This initial exposure had deep impact in my mind and strange affection towards ecological sciences. I took Zoology, Botany and Chemistry for my graduation and Environmental Sciences for masters. I was offered to work on birds of my University campus for master’s dissertation, which I turned down, as I had already made a list. This led to my first hop with the frogs!! Thanks to my guide, who introduced me to a whole new world of amphibians. So I landed up doing my Masters’ dissertation on the habitat characters of Wrinkled frog Nyctibatrachus cf. major. This little stint with wrinkled frog made me to look further and to expand my horizon in the field of Batrachology. I hopped in finding the effect of habitat fragmentation on distribution and ecology of anuran amphibians in central Western Ghats for doctoral studies. For next couple of years, field and lab were my first home and frogs my best relatives. I traveled extensively in the Kudremukh, Bhadra and Kuppali forest ranges of Western Ghats, be it in hot summer or down pouring of the monsoon. This exhaustive exercise yielded in the discovery of a new wrinkled frog Nyctibatrachus karnatakaensis. Even after Ph.D., I was in constant search for some thing more and beyond mere academic rituals! What better place than Indian Institute of Science for this? My present research supervisor asked me to look into two research projects he was handling – one on cumulative impact assessment in a heavily dammed river basin and the other on forest fragmentation quantification. Finally, I landed up in Energy and Wetland Research Group, Centre for Ecological Sciences, IISc on 30 June 2003 and still pursuing my research interest.