Bannerghatta National Park - Insects
A very interesting tree bark mantis
The Bannerghatta National Park is very close to Bangalore, around 20 km from the middle of the city. What most people do not know it is a National Park with a beautiful nature and not only a big outside cage for lions and tigers. I was visiting the Animal Rescue Centre, a very good and non-profit organisation which takes care for wound animals and releases them after healing them. I visited the Park together with my friend Sam, without whom the hole thing would have been impossible to make. Many thanks for that! We were allowed to walk a little bit inside the park and we visited some illegal and recently closed granite mine, which nature had already started to take over again.
The habitat in Bannerghatta is really interesting, rocky and yet in some places very humid
There were small ponds with signs of land crabs and many frog species, as well as many incredible and probably new species of grasshopper and mantis, all of which showed an amazing mimicking of their surroundings. There were, to name a few, stick mantis, stone like grasshoppers, sticklike grasshoppers and many others. The variety of spiders was also very high. There were signature spiders and lynx spiders, also some nice species of jumping spiders, just watch the pictures and you will get the idea. The guy who runs the Animal Rescue Centre, Saleem, showed me some pictures he had taken in Bannerghatta and there were some pictures of very beautiful Cetonidae species and others. I did not meet these when I was there.
Hierodula spec., sub adult female
Bannerghatta makes a great daytrip from Bangalore and also is a good opportunity to escape the stress and business of the City.
Any questions, or (in this case more important) any identifications of the species photographed, please write email to me.
All Pictures © Copyright of their respective owners.