IWN Daily Digest — Wednesday, 2 September 2026
Four of Asia’s hornbill species have a genome to call their own for the first time. Researchers at the Nature Conservation Foundation and Hyderabad’s CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology have sequenced full reference genomes for the great hornbill, the rufous-necked hornbill, the Malabar pied hornbill and the wreathed hornbill.
As reported by Mongabay India:
“Scientists have generated a reference genome, a genetic structure model, for four threatened Asian hornbill species. The high-quality genome assemblies were generated for the great hornbill, rufous-necked hornbill, Malabar-pied hornbill and wreathed hornbill by researchers from the Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore and CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad.”
The work is led by Pooja Pawar, a behavioural biologist who studied great hornbills nesting in both protected forest and the coffee plantations around Valparai, Tamil Nadu, before turning to genomics for her PhD. Before her team’s paper, only two of Asia’s 32 hornbill species had any whole genome on record.
Pawar’s team combined long-read and short-read DNA sequencing at CCMB to build the four new genomes, a hybrid approach that catches errors either method would miss alone. WWF India‘s Meghana Natesh, who wasn’t involved in the study, called it a “very useful resource,” pointing to how poorly Asian species are represented in the world’s genomic databases.
Running the new genomes through a population-history model, the team found that all four species went through steep declines during the Pleistocene, as shifting climates squeezed their numbers. The wreathed hornbill, the most widespread of the four, held on to a larger population than the rest throughout. The rufous-necked hornbill, the rarest of the group, survives today mainly in India’s northeastern forests, with its strongest numbers in Arunachal Pradesh.
Sacred Ground
A new study in Kerala’s Kasaragod district finds that predators attack far more prey inside sacred groves than in the home gardens next door. These tiny, centuries-old forest patches, protected by tradition rather than law, are pulling more ecological weight than their size suggests.
As reported by Mongabay India:
“Scattered across India, sacred groves are often celebrated as relics of ancient forests. Protected for generations through cultural and religious traditions, these patches of native vegetation often serve as refuges for native plants, birds and insects. Now, a new study finds that instances of predators eating caterpillars was consistently higher in Kerala’s sacred groves than in nearby multi-storied home gardens, indicating that this ecological process that helps regulate populations of herbivorous insects, was stronger in sacred groves.”
Ecologist Palatty Allesh Sinu and his team at the Central University of Kerala tested the idea using more than 2,000 fake caterpillars, moulded from soft, non-toxic plasticine and pinned to leaves, branches and stems. They set up 12 paired sites across the Kasaragod region — a sacred grove and a nearby home garden at each — and returned after 48 hours to count the bite marks left behind.
Ants did most of the damage, followed by birds. Predation fell off with distance from the Western Ghats inside the sacred groves, but rose with distance in the home gardens — the opposite of what the researchers had expected going in.
Grove size made no real difference to the results. “Conservation in fragmented landscapes cannot rely solely on the protection of large, continuous forests,” Sinu said, pointing to habitat complexity rather than acreage as the deciding factor.
Sources: Mongabay India · Mongabay India
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