BANGALORE: If you spot a leopard straying into your neighbourhood, go indoors, lock the doors and let it be: it will leave in a while. This was one of the lessons young nature conservation enthusiasts learned at the Student Conference on Conservation Science here.
Organised by a host of institutions, among which are the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Nature Conservation Foundation, and the National Centre for Biological Sciences, the international conference is held at Cambridge, Bangalore, New York and Brisbane.
The three-day Bangalore edition took off on Thursday with students from 18 countries participating.
Highly adaptable
Delivering the plenary speech on “Conservation of Leopards in a Human-Dominated Landscape”, wildlife biologist Vidya Athreya said that leopards were highly adaptable animals that usually avoided human beings. Dispelling assumptions that a large number of leopards were being killed in man-animal conflicts, she said that the rate of conservation of leopards in India could be pegged at 99 per cent.
“The media only reports incidents in which leopards are killed. But most of the time, they peacefully coexist in human habitats,” she said.
In the urban habitat, if a leopard is spotted, all one has to do is keep children away, while in villages, livestock should be protected.
Tiger reserves
Speaking on the sidelines of the conference, conservation biologist Krithi K. Karanth termed the decision to close tourism in tiger reserves a “temporary injunction rather than a permanent ban”.
She suggested a cap on the number of people and vehicles in tiger reserves.
Source: The Hindu,3rd August, 2012