Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Workshop throws up lessons in nature conservation

— PHOTO: S. THANTHONI

A PLEDGE: Members of Enviro Club of Women’s Christian College take an oath to conserve nature at a workshop held on Thursday.

CHENNAI: For the students who participated in a programme organised by the Enviro Club of Women’s Christian College here on Thursday, it was a lesson well learnt in conserving nature.

The students, who participated in a day-long workshop, have prepared booklets, flyers, posters and bookmarks on conserving three species: frogs, bats and monkeys.

At the workshop the students learnt about habitat, life and food habits of the species and the threat that human beings pose to them. The programme was sponsored by the Zoo Outreach Organisation and organised in collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature and South Asia Zoo Educators Association.

The IUCN has declared 2008 as the ‘year of the frog’. The participants in the programme would ensure that they get 3,000 signatures for the on-going ‘Save the Frog’ campaign, said Jessie Jayakaran, resource person for the programme. Through the campaign it is proposed to collect two million signatures from around the world and send them to the IUCN headquarters in Switzerland.

The workshop was held as a run-up to International Biodiversity Day to be celebrated on December 29. For sometime now the Zoology students were studying the behaviour of a colony of bats roosting on trees on the campus, said Mary Pearl of the Department of Advanced Zoology and Biotechnology. “The bats have been pollinating one of our trees, the sausage fruit tree (Genus: Kigelia). Our staff members have been studying the bats’ behaviour,” she said.

The events held on Thursday would be published in Zoos’ Print, a magazine for news of events on zoos and wildlife networks in South Asia, the organisers said. Dr. Pearl and Pauline Deborah of the Department of Plant Biology and Plant Biotechnology co-ordinated the workshop.

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