Tree growth influences forest community dynamics and responses to environmental variations, but currently is not well understood. Tree growth in highly diverse wet tropical forests have been well studied and characterised ...

By combining laboratory experiments with field work, I have looked at the following aspects of cellular slime mould (CSM) biology: (a) the genetic structure of social groups (fruiting bodies) in the wild and its relation ...

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 ...

Despite a long history of investigations on protective ant-plant interactions, since the late 19century (Thomas Belt 1874), a comprehensive quantitative understanding of the adaptations that facilitate these associations ...

Various ecological and human-induced disturbances play an important role in defining the health of an animal. To cope up with such threats or challenges to its homeostasis, an animal responds by secreting stress hormones ...

Tropical habitats face a diverse range of anthropogenic threats. Two common and important threats to tropical biodiversity are invasive species and roads. Invasive plants are proposed to be a major threat to biodiversity ...

In this thesis, I characterise five species of the bushcricket genus Mecopoda with respect to their acoustic signals and morphology and investigate the phenomenon of acoustic synchrony in one of these five species: Mecopoda ...

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 ...