The IISc campus in Bangalore is a fairly unique place. It has been protected from the rapid development which the rest of the city  has seen and retains some wild spaces and native vegetation. Its plant community has been modified and added to over the years, fostering an unusual diversity in both plants and animals.

The book Secret Lives: biodiversity of the Indian Institute of Science campus tries to capture this vast diversity.  The book is crammed with many beautiful and exciting photographs of campus wildlife by the award winning photographer, Dr. Natasha Mhatre, who just graduated from the Centre for Ecological Sciences.

But the photographs are only the beginning. The book is also a quick whistle-stop tour of many ideas in ecology and evolutionary biology. Unlike other books on biodiversity, Secret Lives does not contain lists of all the birds, animals, insects or plants on campus. The book instead has chapters that read like a list of the bare necessities of life, 'Habitat', 'Food', 'Water', 'Sex', 'Babies', etc. They describe the ideas that biologists have had through the years about these different aspects of life, why and how these ideas came to be as they are; the general theories in biology.

Price Rs. 1500