‘Pythons live at peace with porcupines in burrows — science encourages curiosity'

Aditi Mukherjee is a conservation scientist at the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History. She tells Times Evoke Inspire about her research on pythons and porcupines, predators and prey, coexisting calmly:

- Aditi Mukherjee

I study burrowing animals which make their homes underground. My study site is in Bharatpur’s Keoladeo National Park, where I started researching Indian crested porcupines (Hystrix indica) in 2016. Using technologies like camera traps and customised burrow video cameras which could enter their homes, we began exploring how the porcupine creates its residence. It is an amazing builder and makes intricate burrow systems, where living chambers are connected through a tunnel. Porcupines construct their homes like we make ours — imagine a living room, bedrooms, etc., connected through corridors underground. These tunnels are very narrow. Our camera could reach to about 11 metres but the tunnels are much longer, with an average height of 0.1 to 0.5 metres and a width of 0.2 to 0.5 metres. The living chambers are double the size of the tunnel itself. The elaborate internal architecture of porcupine burrows was a revelation — but more surprises awaited.

We discovered that Indian rock pythons (Python molurus) were using these homes too — this was amazing as porcupines and pythons are prey and predator. But the two species had scientifically divided the space between them — the porcupines live in different chambers and emerge only when the pythons are in their own rooms. Also, the pythons enter the burrows after having eaten elsewhere. Other species, like leaf-nosed bats, had rooms here as well. They too are prey for pythons but they also lived in segregated chambers. This organised lack of interactions between prey and predator within the same space was fascinating.