Back to imagesGallery: Kathlekan’s Myristica Swamps (Karnataka, India) - June 2015
The myristica swamps are a rare freshwater forest ecosystem found only in India’s southern Western Ghats. They are characterised by the largely wet, damp, and nutrient-poor forest floor and the counter-adaptation of the myristica trees to form stilt roots or knee roots. This ecosystem in turn provides habitat to some of the most range-limited fauna and flora in the world.
In 2015, Saurabh and I visited one such swamp in Kathlekan as part of a filming project on frogs. We were completely smitten by the beauty of the place, with its interesting and unfamiliar forest floor teeming with life (largely leeches). Here are a few images from our filming site, with our temporary shelter in place.
In these images, besides the forest and its floor, there is the Fishing Spider and Kumbara Night Frog, which is famous for its pottery skills as it uses mud and clay to conceal its eggs.
