‘Antman’ predicts early & good r

Nagpur:Amidst fears of heat records being broken in the current month, there has also emerged some good news. Vidarbha may get relief from the harsh summer sooner than expected, even before May ends. Full-fledged monsoon is also expected to arrive at least a week earlier than usual.
These are some of the predictions made by city-based chemist and environmentalist Surjyoti Bagchi.On the basis of nests made by weaver ants, he has been making predictions about monsoon since 2009. Most of his predictions have proven right. This year, he has observed the nests coming up near Koradi thermal power plant earlier than usual.
"When I visited the site on Sunday, they had already started building their nests. They do this around three weeks before arrival of rains. The colonies of weaver ants generally come up on trees like mango, karanj and jambul in Koradi and other high vegetation areas," explained Bagchi who works with a private power plant. He added that the shape, size, direction and height of the nests are good indicators of how the rainy season would be.
His prediction for this year is early onset of both pre-monsoon and monsoon showers. "The ants have started their nest building activity one month earlier than the normal time that points towards the possibility of early rainfall. Also, a horticulturist friend of mine told me that a flowering plant called bahawa in Marathi has bloomed earlier than usual. Nature is giving many such indications," he said.
Other observations about the ant nests this year include their shape being oblong and them being located towards the higher parts of the tree trunks. From this, Bagchi concluded that all districts of Vidarbha will experience a normal rainfall while Nagpur district will have more than normal . Normal rainfall all through the monsoon season for Nagpur district is around 976mm. According to Bagchi's predictions, the district will receive at least 1100mm this year.
Usually, Bagchi can also predict dates of arrival of monsoon. This year, though, since he doesn't know when the nest building activity exactly started, he hasn't been able to come up with exact dates.