IWN Daily Digest — Friday, 4 September 2026
Scientists have named a newly discovered frog species from Tripura‘s Jampui Hills after Padmini Varkey, a Kerala woman known to generations of Thiruvananthapuram students and activists simply as Ammachi.
As Down To Earth reported:
“A newly discovered frog in the forests of Tripura has given an unexpected afterlife to the memory of a Kerala woman who spent much of her own life caring for people. The frog, Amolops ammachi, has been named after Padmini Varkey, affectionately known as Ammachi, by a team of scientists led by S D Biju of the University of Delhi, widely known as the ‘Frogman of India.'”
S D Biju knew Ammachi long before frogs became his life’s work. As a young activist in Thiruvananthapuram in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was a friend of her son Ashokan and one of many who found an open door at the Varkey household.
Padmini Varkey worked in Kerala’s Health Department and stayed close to Left and progressive movements. She later devoted herself to palliative care and welfare work, feeding whoever turned up and rarely asking why they had come. She died in 2015.
Amolops ammachi belongs to the Cascade Frogs, a genus of roughly 100 species tied to fast-flowing forest streams across Asia. This one measures about 80 millimetres and carries olive-green markings against a light-brown body.
Biju’s team found it during a survey spanning more than 15 years across all seven northeastern states, which turned up over 300 geographic populations of Cascade Frogs. Alongside ammachi, the survey also produced two more new species: the Sendenyu Cascade Frog from Nagaland and the Beautiful Cascade Frog from West Bengal. The research, published in Harvard’s Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, traces the group’s diversification back roughly 32 million years to the early uplift of the Himalayas.
New Bloom
Botanists have also identified a new flowering plant in the shola grasslands of the Agasthyamala Biosphere Reserve, which straddles Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
As Down To Earth reported:
“A flowering plant growing in the shola grasslands of the Western Ghats has been recognised as a new species. The species, described as Osbeckia ulotricha, belongs to the Melastomataceae family and was recorded from the Agasthyamala Biosphere Reserve, a protected natural area in southern India spreading across the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.”
Researchers at the Botanical Survey of India‘s Southern Regional Centre in Coimbatore named the plant for the woolly hair on its flower base, distinguishing it from two close relatives in the Melastomataceae family on the strength of pollen, seed and hair structure rather than looks alone. It flowers between February and May at elevations of 1,200 to 1,500 metres in the Western Ghats. The survey team has so far found just under 50 flowering individuals, spread across three sites within less than a square kilometre. The species has been assessed as Data Deficient under IUCN criteria, pending a fuller population study.
Sources: Down To Earth · Down To Earth
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