: A scientist, who has spent his entire life researching different types of fauna (animals) that live in the ‘hyporheic’ zone, a region beneath and alongside a stream bed, decried the free sand policy of the State government, saying that it will have devastating impact on biodiversity and environment in the long run.
Retired professor of Acharya Nagarjuna University (ANU) Y. Ranga Reddy in his research paper “On the little-known hyporheic biodiversity of India, with annotated checklist of copepods and bathynellaceans (Crustacea) and a note on the disastrous implications of indiscriminate sand mining” published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa, said the highly fragile hyporheic habitats and their associated biota like crabs were being gouged out along with their homes.
The dubious ‘eco-friendly’ policy announced by certain State governments, providing for sand extraction up to two metres, was utterly myopic and disastrous to sand-associated life because most of the hyporheic life was confined to the upper one metre or so of the sediment, he says.
According to Prof. Ranga Reddy, the vast and ecologically diversified hyporheic realm and the adjacent riparian areas of India have received scant attention from the standpoint of biodiversity studies.
The analysis of about 2,500 samples collected from the alluvial sediments of certain rivers and streams, besides some bores in the riparian zone, mainly in the coastal deltaic belt of the rivers Krishna and Godavari in Andhra Pradesh State during 2000–2012 yielded 41 copepod and bathynellacean species. Of these, 31 new species have been formally described during the ongoing studies whereas the remainder are previously known ones. An additional 20 new species in the samples are yet to be named and described.
Some of the species found belonged to taxa (groups) that had clear-cut Gondwanan lineages, representing the remnants of unique fauna that require urgent attention from conservationists, he said.
