Environment › Species in news
Plants, insects and newly described species
Plants, fungi, insects and the other species with no theme of their own, species newly described or rediscovered in India, and the ideas that tie species to ecosystems, such as keystone species and pollination. Prelims has asked what follows from a fall in butterfly populations and which organism performs the waggle dance.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2017: consequences of a fall in butterfly populations
17 Aug 2026 · Prelims and Mains
Pollinators and beekeeping
A pollinator is infrastructure, and India's honey output has nearly doubled in a decade on the back of it.
- The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) credits bee pollination with almost a third of global crop output.
- Yields improve in 87 of 115 leading food crops.
- Output rose from about 76,000 tonnes in 2013-14 to about 151,000 tonnes in 2025-26.
- India is the second largest producer after China and the third largest exporter by value.
- About 70 per cent of the honey is exported.
- The National Beekeeping and Honey Mission carries the Centre's support for beekeeping and honey, and proposes doubling bee colonies by 2030.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2023: the organism that performs the waggle dance
11 Aug 2026 · Prelims and Mains
Ecoacoustics
Ecoacoustics reads distribution, abundance and behaviour off sound, which is what works in dense forest where little can be seen.
- India's first open access ecoacoustic dataset holds nearly 100 hours of soundscapes recorded by ecologists and enthusiasts since 2025.
- It covers birds, insects, frogs, bats, reptiles and marine animals.
- Machine learning models that identify a species by its call have until now been trained mostly on Global North recordings.
- Being crowdsourced and open, the dataset can train those models on Indian calls rather than borrowed ones.
The Indian Express, 11 Aug 2026: Where the wild things are heard (opens in a new tab)