Guttikonda Bilam, also known as Guthikonda Bilam, is a historic cave and a hill in

Piduguralla Piduguralla is a town in Palnadu district of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.The town is the headquarters of Piduguralla mandal and administered under Gurazala revenue division. The town is also known as ''Lime City of India '' as there are ...

Mandal,

Guntur Guntur () is a city and the administrative headquarters of Guntur district in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Guntur is spread across 168.49 km square and is the third-largest city in the state. It is situated to the west of the Ba ...

District of

Andhra Pradesh Andhra Pradesh (, abbr. AP) is a state in the south-eastern coastal region of India. It is the seventh-largest state by area covering an area of and tenth-most populous state with 49,386,799 inhabitants. It is bordered by Telangana to the ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

. Guttikonda or Guthikonda is the name of a nearby village, while "Bilam" is the

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

word for "cave". There are several caves in the region, collectively known as "Guthikonda Caves"; Guttikonda Bilam is the most well-known of these caves.Guntur District
National Informatics Centre The cave is located around 3 km south of the Guttikonda village, which lies 15 km from

, in the

Guntur district Guntur district is one of the twenty six districts in the Coastal Andhra region of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The administrative seat of the district is located at Guntur, the largest city of the district in terms of area and with a po ...

Biology

No publications report on the biology of the cave till 2008. It was Mr. Shabuddin Shaik, an enthusiastic M. Sc zoology student of Acharya Nagarjuna University, who discovered tiny milky white creature for the first time in cave Guthikonda. Later isopod taxonomist decided to open a new chapter in Indian Phreatoicidea and identified as a new genus and species and named as ''Andhracoides shabuddin'' in honor of Mr. Shabuddin Shaik by naming the new species for "his child-like curiosity and inherent scientific interest at Taxonomy, Biodiversity & his concern for environment." The plankton samples of the cave pools, however, yielded only a dense population of stygophilic ''Mesocyclops'' sp also during his first visit.

References

{{reflist Caves of Andhra Pradesh