Browsing Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES) by thesis submitted date"2019"
Now showing items 1-14 of 14
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Biogeography and comparative phylogeography of freshwater snails of India
Distribution of flora and fauna is shaped by both current and historical processes. In my thesis I concentrated on how the historical component of the governing processes have dictated the current distribution of biota. ... -
Dispersal Patterns and Processes in Littorinid Snails along the Indian Coastline
Dispersal has important ecological and evolutionary consequences for a species. Marine dispersal is unique because of facilitation by ocean currents, where oceanography interacts with species traits and environmental ... -
Dynamic colour change in Psammophilus dorsalis: role of natural and sexual selection
Overall, the results from this study support the idea that animal signals arise from a balance between increased conspicuousness for social signalling and inconspicuousness to avoid predation risk. Animals that can change ... -
Ecology of predator-prey interactions in the context of mate searching
Animals communicating in the context of mate searching benefit by increasing their likelihood of encountering mates. Mate searching begins the important process of individuals of opposite sexes forming pairs, which is ... -
Foraging Decisions of the Lesser False Vampire Bat, Megaderma Spasma in a Heterogeneous Landscape
Predators make various foraging decisions at different spatial and temporal scales. Such decisions can be studied at two levels: patch decisions at the landscape level, and prey decisions at the foraging patch level. In ... -
The influence of landscape composition on butterfly populations: A behavioural ecological approach
Overall, taking behavioural ecological and trait-based approaches, my study suggests that the distribution of a species and patterns in its population densities in a landscape are affected by diverse ecological variables, ... -
Intrasexual competition in females of a socially polygynous lizard, Psammophilus dorsalis
Competition between individuals of the same sex, intrasexual competition, has received much attention in males, mainly because such competition, which is primarily for mates (i.e. sexual selection), often selects for ... -
Intrinsic Noise in Collective Dynamics
Animal groups exhibit many emergent properties that are a consequence of local interactions. Linking individual-level behaviour to group-level dynamics has been a question of fundamental interest from both biological and ... -
Lineage delimitation and diversification in Nyctibatrachus, an endemic frog genus from the Western Ghats
Determining how biodiversity is produced and maintained remains one of the fundamental questions in ecology. The phenomenon of diversification, which occurs via the interplay of speciation and extinction, holds the key ... -
Multimodal Duetting and Pair Formation in a Paleotropical False Leaf Katydid, Onomarchus uninotatus
The spectacular diversity in the pair-formation strategies among animal groups has attracted the attention of many over the years. The roots of this diversity lie in the diversity of challenges that males and females face ... -
A Phylogenetic Perspective on The Phytogeography of Western Ghats
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 ... -
A place for everything and everything in its place: Spatial organization of wasps on the nests of the primitively eusocial paper wasp Ropalidia marginata
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, ... -
Spatial and temporal patterns of vegetation- climate interactions
In this thesis, I tried to understand the patterns and processes of vegetation trends at different spatial scales and resolution. The spatial variability in vegetation trends was related to inter and intra-annual changes ... -
Understanding Rules of Assembly and Species Interactions in Mixed-species Bird Flocks
In mixed-species bird flocks (flocks hereafter), participants vary in their degree of similarity with each other. Flock participants can gain group size (supplementary) benefits by choosing similar flock partners, or ...