As the “Clean India” initiative picks up, the one big hurdle in the way is that of effective waste management. Ill managed waste not only makes cities untidy, it also adds to global warming and pollution, finds new research.

“There is only one nature – the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one” said Bill Wulf, an engineer. Researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, have recently explained how a group of fungus-growing termites “bioengineer” the soil with their secretions and construct stable mounds. This process is termed “bio-cementation”, where termites alter soil properties to build strong mounds.

Ask any person from a big city and they will tell you how house hunting is one of the biggest banes around! Now if you thought that was difficult, try and surmise the perils of house hunting that fall upon an animal. Animals have to search for a habitat with good nutritious food resources while evading dangerous predators and other risks. With the added dimension of seasonally changing resources and risk, animals have their task cut out to decide which habitat they should use at a given point of time. Apart from that, there are added conflicts brought in by conversion of natural landscapes for urbanisation and development. In the face of so many dynamic factors, finding livable habitat becomes a challenge. For animals, like urban house hunters, finding a place to live is no child’s play.

The fig-wasp is a tiny insect that lays its eggs in figs, which bear ever tinier flowers within them. As the female wasp lays eggs, it also deposits on the flowers pollen from the figs in which it was born. Figs act as bassinets for the new eggs, allowing them to hatch and develop into adults. The adults mate within the fig, before the female wasp takes off for another fig to lay eggs in, with help from the blind and wingless males which cut an exit opening for the females. The males are left behind in the fig to die a quiet death. Thus wasps help figs by pollinating their flowers, while figs provide wasps with mating and hatching grounds. This give-and-take relationship, a kind of ‘mutualism’, has remained intact for over 80 million years. This scenario is the norm for half the fig species in the world which are bisexual and have male and female flowers in the same fig.