The leaf-strewn forest floor is moist, thanks to the water pouring off the bamboo and tree trunks overhead. While the constant trickle through the leaves is distracting, it’s hard to take your eyes off of what looks like a white diamond-mesh crochet piece discarded on the forest floor. Kneel down for a closer look and you see the conical, wrinkled brown head of a mushroom peeking out from the centre of this circular, delicately woven mesh. This look —brown head covered by what looks like a lacy veil — gives it the name: the bridal veil mushroom.
Bridal veils emerge from leaf litter on forest floors during the monsoon. But it’s not just the fungi — of astonishing sizes, colours (some even glow in the dark) and smells — that come alive during the season. Though the monsoon is not a time when many plants flower — though some burst into flamboyant blossoms — the season also kickstarts the life cycles of numerous animal species.
For instance, the foxtail orchid, Rhynchostylis retusa, throws down its thick tress-like cascades of cream and pink flowers from the tree trunks it adheres to only after the onset of the monsoon in the Western Ghats , says Dr William Decruse, scientist at Thiruvananthapuram’s Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute (JNTBGRI).
While some orchid species flower towards the end of the rains, others rely on the monsoon to time their blooms. The orchid, Vanda wightii , endemic to the Western Ghats and growing in the Malabar regions of Kerala, flowers in the short, dry spell between the end of the monsoon and the start of the next rains, according to Dr Decruse.
Some plants are ‘monsoonal’ in nature; they germinate only with the onset of the monsoon, while others, apparently, cannot grow without it. For instance, a species of the delicate wild balsam, Impatiens theuerkaufiana — discovered from Wayanad’s Chembra peak in 2013 — appears on tree trunks of forest trees only with the start of the monsoon. But a pause in rainfall (even a short week-long dry spell) can cause it to lose its leaves. The monsoon transforms the lateritic plateaus of Karnataka’s Uttara Kannada district into seasonal wetlands where small, water-loving herbs (wild balsams, pipeworts and bladderworts) bloom in hundreds, providing crucial honey sources for native bees when many other plants do not bloom in the incessant rain.
The call of the monsoon seeps even into the soil. After the first showers, the soil-dwelling purple frog, Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis, burrows out — the only time in the year that the frogs emerge from their underground homes. Which is why researcher Sandeep Das calls them ‘Mahabali of Frogs’. Once above ground, males and females mate, lay the eggs in hill-stream pools and burrow back into the soil in a couple of hours.
The delay in the monsoon this year has affected breeding. Most of the eggs across the five sites in the Ghats that he has been monitoring this season have been destroyed due to the lack of rain, says Sandeep. “Over the last nine years, such large-scale destruction has occurred only twice before.”
Dr Decruse says the flowering of the foxtail orchid has also been delayed this year. “The timing and intensity of rains are crucial for these plants. Changes in the monsoon can change these rhythms.”
