Sahyadrica

  OR The fabulous, fantastic, fascinating fly and our ridiculous, plain fascination for a sickly computer-simulated life Allegory on Life and Death (~1598), Joris and Jaccob Hoefnagel. Jacob Hoefnagel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. There is no escape from reality means the same as there is no world without insects. This uncharacteristic piece that started as an idea that disrupted my planned course of thought that had me announce of my hiatus last year presents itself as I get attracted to this preposterous idea of living in a bubble orchestrated, for all I know, by a child. Here, and since it has been resurrected, I go back to 1999 when I watched the movie The Matrix: my eyes squinting at the grainy green filter of the sixth simulated world, my mind screaming at the lack of non-human substance that drained life out of the movie’s substance. The movie itself amazed me, save for the, spoiler alert, use of humans, the most prolific consumer of all animals – as b...

A tiger crosses a river, beyond the designated Protected Area cover, in the central Indian wilderness, a rare parcel of land that is borderless, just a tad-bit careful about avoiding humans as they too amble along the same river. The process of population isolation, driven by habitat loss and fragmentation, leads to population extinctions and reduction in biological diversity (Rosenberg, Noon & Meslow, 1997). That isolated populations are significantly more prone to extinction with increasing interpopulation distance has been observed in various taxa, including insects (Saccheri et al., 1998), fishes (Magnuson et al., 1998), frogs (Sjögren, 1991), snakes (Webb, Brook & Shine, 2002), and mammals – from the small island marsupials (see Miller et al., 2011) to large carnivores such as tigers (see Sagar et al., 2021), as has been theoretically put forth by Wright (1943) in the iconic ‘isolation by distance’, and later demonstrated by MacArthur and Wilson (1967) in their treatise ‘T...