The need to maintain and enhance the urban and suburban populations of wild life has greatly increased in recent past due to a desire to observe wild life closer to home and a concern to protect the habitat from rapid urbanisation.   There is an urgent need to foster wild life awareness among the urban dwellers so that policies on wild life and protection issues can be better evaluated. Planners who take environmental decisions based on limited information available on biological components of the area to be impacted also become misleading.   Therefore I strongly feel that habitat requirements of individual species must be known before the implementation of management or planning schemes.   Many studies have discussed the necessity for information about the habitat components that are important in the urban areas and have emphasised that there is a need for more research on wild life in areas to obtain detailed knowledge on the characteristics of urban fish and wild life population. Planning for wild life in urban areas is often stifled by inadequate support and lack of collaboration from resource agencies and awareness of importance of lakes and expertise in wild life matters by urban planners.   City planners have ultimate responsibilities for incorporating wild life issues in to the planning process. But the results are not encouraging.

The solution to this dilemma is either to encourage greater collaboration between wild life regulatory agencies, municipal planners or to familiarise the planners with wild life resources through literature relevant to both the disciplines.   This study is a humble attempt to identify life forms in a city lake and to learn and recommend the habitat requirements of the animals. The major water bodies of India are facing serious threats of aquatic pollution consequent to urbanisation and industrial growth.   Domestic, agricultural and industrial wastes are being indiscriminately discharged into aquatic ecosystems.   At present environmental studies seem to be focused more on water quality parameters than on the total ecological changes brought about in the aquatic systems.   It was therefore thought it would be interesting to make a preliminary survey of the pattern and impact of various industrial and other effluents   on the Madiwala lake.

Christ College, Bangalore, India.