Siju Cave

Siju Dobakkol (Siju Cave), is also known as Bat Cave in English, it is by far the most well-known cave in India. It is located in the North East Indian state of Meghalaya near the Napak Lake and Simsang River game reserve. It is a limestone cave and is famous for its stalagmites and stalactites. Siju Dobakkol is the home of tens of thousands of bats. It is bio- speleologically the best researched cave in the Indian subcontinent, having been investigated by the unrivalled interdisciplinary research project undertaken as early as 1922 by Stanley Kemp and K Chopra of the Indian Museum, Kolkata.

The Siju cave-system is more than 4 kilometres long, but nearly all of it is filled with water and inaccessible. The limestone hills of Meghalaya receive a lot of rain and moisture and holds many other cave-systems, some of them much longer and larger than Siju, but Siju Cave is among the most thoroughly researched and explored systems.

In 1927, it was found that the Siju caves have a constant temperature of 21–26.4 °C. Until 1981 it was India's longest cave at 1200m. Today with 4,772m of surveyed length it is currently India's 14th longest.

Biodiversity and faunistic composition

 * Arachnida: Opilionida, Schizomida
 * Myriapoda: Diplopoda Julida, Decapoda Natantia
 * Crustacea: Isopoda Oniscidea
 * Collembola: Entomobryomorpha
 * Insecta: Orthoptera

Some rare bat species live in these caves.