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This Interventions essay presents 14 stories of, and positions on, urban climates in South Asia. We look analytically and linguistically from this region to engage the terms ‘mahaul’, ‘mausam’ and ‘aab-o-hawa’ as critical concepts to conceptualize climate in its political, social, historic, atmospheric, ecological, material, sensory and embodied registers. Gathered together, the stories scaffold a perspective on climate that connects concerns about broader structural conditions (mahaul); local and lived experiences in different temporal registers (mausam) and sociomaterial entanglements that demand new ways of knowing nature (aab-o-hawa). An expansive yet grounded conceptualization allows us to narrate individual cases and local climate stories in their multiplicity and difference, rather than through cumulative effects across much wider geographies. This essay on South Asian urban climates provides an analytical frame based on shared colonial history, and geographies connecting experiences of climate across fraught geopolitical borders. These diverse South Asian urbanisms provide evidence of a range of environmental vulnerabilities, while seeking possibilities in already existing climates—in the seas and airs that reorient the experience of land and atmosphere, in centering marginalized voices, in historical remnants to read contemporary urban change, in exploring planning agency grounded in local politics, and from the position of partial knowledge that being within urban climates entails.

Life-history theory predicts that predator-induced defences should incur fitness costs. In larval amphibians, the most frequently reported cost is reduced energy intake due to lower foraging rates; however, recent reports suggest that this trade-off may be uncoupled through morphological and physiological adaptations. Metabolism is a measure of energy expenditure and plasticity in respiration may potentially offset other costs of predator-induction. The aim of this study was to measure the indirect effects of dragonfly larvae on the respiration rate of tadpoles of the Arabian toad (Bufo arabicus) over time and at different predator concentrations. We performed two experiments. In the first experiment (time–response), we exposed tadpoles either to the indirect presence of odonate larvae or predator-free conditions and measured respiration rates 3, 5, 8, 11, 13, 15, 19 and 26 days after the start of the experiment. In the second experiment (dose–response), we used three levels of predator chemicals, equivalent to 1 predator per 10, 100 or 1,000 l plus controls. The respiration rate of predator-exposed tadpoles varied initially, but was 56.3% of controls after 26 days. In the dose–response experiment, the respiration rate of all predator-exposed tadpole groups was reduced by between 19.1 and 27.2% after 21 days. The study demonstrates a mechanism by which tadpoles may be able to adjust their physiology to partially offset the costs of lower energy intake due to predator avoidance.