Cooperation is ubiquitous across taxa in the animal kingdom. For example, microbes cooperate in producing antibiotic-resistant biofilms, mammals and birds collectively mob predators, and humans cooperate in utilization of ...

The fig–fig wasp system is a brood site pollination system where pollinators breed inside an enclosed globular inflorescence (syconium) that they pollinate. This pollination mutualism is subjected to exploitation by the ...

This thesis is spurred by the overarching question “why is a plant where it is in space and time?”, which, when asked in different global communities over the last century or so, has contributed to the development of general ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Colobines are group of primates known to inhabit harsh environments. These habitats pose different challenges which they have coped up physiologically and behaviourally. Primates in such environments are subjected to ...