Plants, insects and newly described species

Prelims and Mains

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.

Prelims and Mains

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.

Prelims

The Zoological Survey of India and the Botanical Survey of India publish an annual account of species newly described from India and species recorded in the country for the first time; this subject holds the 2025 account.