Large herbivores can selectively feed on nutrient rich resources, resulting in regular deposition of high quality organic matter in the form of dung. In tropical forests such as in southern India it is estimated that large ...

Many ecosystems exhibit striking patterns in the spatial distribution of organisms, for example, patterns of clumping and dispersion in semi-arid vegetation, mussel in intertidal beds and even sea-grass and macroalgae. ...

Over the last decade, several studies have shown the importance of individual variation in natural populations. Theoretical ecological studies are beginning to incorporate trait variations in models, but they continue to ...

Altruism is defined as a trait in an individual that increases some other individual’s fitness at the expense of her own. Therefore, existence of such traits in a population is an evolutionary paradox, as natural selection ...

A focus in evolutionary biology is to understand the drivers of diversity in animal behavioural traits in the living world. Animals facing similar problems in the environment, such as the problem of how much to invest in ...

I used a finer scale data of 156 published plots across the entire latitudinal range of WG, covering most of the protected forests. The pruned phylogeny for this study consisted of 367 species, of which ~ 50% are taxa endemic ...

In my thesis, I found that queens and workers in the primitively eusocial paper wasp Ropalidia marginata use space on their nests non-randomly with a majority of individuals showing spatial fidelity to small core areas, ...

Animals detect, recognize and localize relevant objects in noisy, multi-source environments. Female crickets locate potential mates in choruses of simultaneously calling males using acoustic signals, a behaviour termed ...

Ropalidia marginata is characterized as a primitively eusocial wasp due to the absence of morphological differentiation between the queen and worker castes. Unlike other primitively eusocial wasps, however, the queen in ...

Over the last two decades, there have been increasing concerns about environmental degradation and its consequences on the long-term sustainability of socio-economic systems around the world. The publication of the report ...