Five years ago, on her way back from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bengaluru, where she often attended seminars, Anuradha Batabyal stopped by to observe brightly-coloured lizards.
Even as a student of zoology, she had never before seen yellow and vermilion lizards bobbing their heads and doing push-ups on wayside rocks. “My interest grew when I saw them again around Nandi Hills and Devarayanadurga,” says Batabyal.
At that time, she didn’t know that Indian rock agamas, a species of lizards, would become the subject of her doctorate at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru. For a doctoral student in India, lizard behaviour is a rare subject to pursue.
“Relatively few Indian researchers have studied reptile behaviour; lizards, even fewer,” says Kartik Shanker, an evolutionary ecologist who is currently the director of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru.
According to the 2011 Census, 31.6% of the Indian population is urban. The United Nation’s World Urbanization Prospects estimates that by 2050, at least half of the country’s populace would have moved to cities.
Urbanization causes large continuous habitats to fragment into smaller, incongruent areas due to the eruption of roads and buildings, consequently eating up a lot of grassy and soil-rich patches, which are essential for the survival of animals.
