VOICE of प्रकृति

  Dear readers,  Welcome back to the VOICEofप्रकृति !                               (read : Voice of Prakriti) Now that we have pondered significantly on trophic levels, allow me to introduce you to the next intriguing topic - Trophic cascades. Trophic cascades are powerful, indirect interactions that can control entire ecosystems. Confused ? Let's discuss how. Firstly, let me introduce two variables that we’ll use from now on—'predator' and 'prey.' The predator is the one who hunts, and the prey is the one being hunted. Mostly, people sympathize with the prey. We often hoped the deer escapes being eaten in our favorite Jataka tales (animal stories often told in childhood), or we cheered for the defeat of the 'evil' tiger in The Jungle Book (humanized traits of tiger kept aside, predators are often portrayed as scary villains). Many would then believe life would be easier without predators right ?...

Dear readers,  Welcome back to the VOICEofप्रकृति :)                                 (read : Voice of Prakriti) Where do you think humans are placed on the food chain ?  Humans can be placed everywhere (except producers). Humans can be primary consumers, secondary consumers, and in many cases, even the apex of the food chain. Humans, therefore, are extremely powerful in terms of having the ability to alter entire ecosystem interactions.   Did you ever wonder how did we become this powerful ? Our position in this food web was not the same; thousands of years back. Let's go back in time. 🕑 I would like to reference a few lines here from Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. Although I couldn’t finish the entire book, the few lines I ended up skimming were so powerful that they’ve stayed with me ever since. I have a question. Can you guess the function of the very first ...

Hello readers, Welcome back to the VOICEofप्रकृति  !                                   (read as : Voice of Prakriti) Before I start, I'd like to thank everyone for the positive response I received on my last blog. The very objective of this page was to reach out to people like you and have (eco)nversations. (Get it ? wordplay on 'eco' and 'conservations', hehe.) Today I've tried my best to dial down some technical info into simple terms, which is quite important as we slowly start to see the bigger picture.  I am sure trophic levels were introduced as a concept in school. But for people who don't know trophic levels, we need to first have a look at the 'food chain'.  Food chain is your simple concept of "who - eats - who". A common example would be grass🪴 being eaten by rabbits🐇, rabbits being eaten by snakes🐍, snakes being eaten by eagles🦅. (I am using emojis to make this fun.) So, ...

Hey readers ! Welcome to the VOICEofप्रकृति :)                                               (read : Voice of Prakriti) Without further ado - lets talk about Ecosystems.  To put it simply, when you look around you - you see and feel many things. You feel the warmth of sunshine, the softness of sand underneath your feet, the wind blowing hair away from your face. You see bright pink flowers pop against the paleness of the cloudy blue sky, lush greens, bees buzzing, something silently slithering by - minding its own business, maybe a puddle of muddy water.  What I described are basically the two basic parts of an ecosystem - living and non living. Flowers, bees, grass, worms or basically any living organism (including you) are called biotic components.   Air, sun, water, soil are all non living parts of an ecosystem, and we will call them abiotic comp...

 Hey readers !  Welcome to the VOICEofप्रकृति (read as : Voice of Prakriti ) ! A tiny bit about me. My name is Prakriti Goswami, a postgrad student from India. Ecology and environment has always been my passion and I wanted to write about the marvelous intricacies of nature, and how our relationship with the environment looks today. I wanted to connect the science of environment and people  - addressing the WHY behind it all. My favourite quote from Rachel Carson is - "The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction." Rachel Carson was a revolutionary in the environment world, btw. She was the one who first exposed the harmful effects of chemical pesticides in her book "Silent Spring", triggering a nationwide movement for the ban of these chemicals.  There are a ton of things I learnt from my first masters in environmental science (i am pursuing MTech now on renewable ene...