Plant–animal interaction systems are complex food webs where the members—plants, pollinators, herbivores, parasites and predators of the pollinators/herbivores—interact with each other in ways which maximize their own ...

Several animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate, communicate using sound and they do so in a non-ideal medium, the habitat in which they live. As acoustic signals pass through the habitat, they suffer loss of information ...

Darwin was troubled by elaborate male traits observed in many species that are seemingly maladaptive for survival, the peacock’s tail being the most iconic of all. He wrote "The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, ...

In this thesis, the biogeography of the centipede family Scolopendridae of the Western Ghats (WG)was studied. First, a novel limited sampling approach to identify putative Gondwanan origin wherein sampling of was confined ...

Species that become naturalized in a new geographical range, subsequently multiply and spread, and persist to the detriment of resident communities, are known as alien invasive species. Two aspects of species invasion – ...

In societies where all individuals are reproductively totipotent and yet, at a given time only one of them reproduces, it is interesting to examine the factor(s) that may influence and predict who will be the reproductive. ...

The present study provides the first description of the calls of a multi-species ensiferan assemblage in a tropical evergreen forest of the Indian subcontinent. I have identified and described the calls of twenty ensiferan ...

This thesis has looked at the proximate mechanisms by which eusociality is maintained in colonies of the primitively eusocial wasp Ropalidia marginata. Unlike other typical primitively eusocial species, the R, marginata ...