Like animals, trees can camouflage themselves too, a new study has found. One tree even kept changing the colour of its leaves to protect them from a giant flightless bird. “Plants are attacked by a bewildering array of herbivores and in response they have evolved a variety of defences to deter predators such as thorns and noxious chemicals,” said Kevin Burns from Victoria University, New Zealand, lead researcher of the new study. “Animals often use colours to hide from predators or advertise de...

Seven years after it ordered creation of a fund to improve the country’s forest cover, the Supreme Court ensured that Rs.10 billion is released from the corpus every year towards afforestation, wildlife conservation and creating rural jobs. The forest bench, headed by Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, made the annual provision for the fund, which is Rs.2 billion more than the Rs.8 billion budgetary allocation to the union Ministry of Environment and Forests for fiscal 2009-10, from the Compensato...

Immediately after putting a ban on vehicular movement at night through Bandipur game sanctuary, Karnataka, the state government decided to keep the decision on hold. Environmentalists are fuming over this decision. The Karnataka forest department had proposed the ban on night vehicular movement along the national highway through Bandipur to save animals from being killed by speeding trucks, buses and vans. The decision has been tagged as “anti-environment and wildlife,” by Hari Somashekar, an en...

The central government is working on a new scheme to modernise forest administration with a view to preventing encroachment and increasing the green cover across the country, Minister of State for Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh said. Further he added “on the lines of police modernisation, we are working on a new scheme to equip forest administrators with the latest communication gadgets, surveillance system, watch towers and firearms to protect and preserve forests from intrusions, viola...