Balu joined the lab in 2011. He completed his Masters in Microbiology from MG University, Kerala. His research interests encompass visual ecology of insects in the context of foraging. For his PhD he used a comparative approach to understand spontaneous and learned colour preferences in tropical and temperate bees (in collaboration with Dr Natalie Hempel de Ibarra). He also looked at adaptive significance of floral colour change from a pollinator’s perspective. He worked as a post-doc with Dr Ullasa Kodandaramaiah (IISER TVM) on evolution of colour preferences in butterflies. Balu later joined Newcastle university as a research associate. Currently Balu is an Associate Professor at Atria University. Shivani joined the lab in 2011. She completed her Masters in biodiversity and conservation from the University of Leeds, UK. Her research interests include plant-animal interactions and foraging behaviour of pollinators and seed dispersers. For her PhD, she worked on the reproductive ecology of Myristica swamp forests, which are akin to terrestrial habitat-islands in the Southern Western Ghats. She continued in the lab as a bridging postdoc examining the significance of touch-sensitive stigmas and followed it up with a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Haifa with Dr Tamar Keasar examining how bumblebees learn to handle complex flowers. Shivani joined Ashoka University as Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology in August 2019. Bharat joined the lab in 2012. He completed his Masters in Genetics from University of Cologne, Germany. His research interest lies in the evolution of sociality. To address this, he used the social spider Stegodyphus sarasinorum as the model organism to study personality-driven task partitioning and how contexts (intrinsic and extrinsic) shape specific behavioural responses. Bharat joined Prof Raghavendra Gadagkar’s lab at IISc Bangalore as a post-doctoral fellow in 2019. He will be joining the group of Prof. Jutta Scheider in the University of Hamburg as a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow. Divya joined the lab as a post-doc in 2012. Divya is broadly interested in predator-prey interactions, evolution and maintenance of deception and camouflage in arthropods, and monitoring biodiversity of Indian spiders and insects. She obtained her PhD from Georgetown University, followed by a post-doc in neuroscience from University of Maryland. During her time here, she studied the presence of personalities in social spiders; and ant mimicry in insects and spiders.She is currently an assistant professor in Azim Premji University. Bahee did his Bachelor’s in Biotechnology and moved to the School of Biological Sciences, Madurai Kamaraj University for his Masters’s degree in Genomics. During his masters, he looked at the use of olfaction in the social communication of the greater short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx. For his Ph.D. he focused on the visual ecology of fruit-feeding bats in southern India. Bahee successfully defended his thesis on 16th of Dec 2022. He later worked as a Post-Doc in Dr. Manjari jain’s lab in IISER Mohali and studied the movement ecology of birds and fruit bats in order to understand how behaviour is shaped by underlying movement patterns. Recently (2025) he was awarded a Short-Term Fellowship at The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and will be joining soon. Reshma joined the lab in 2021 as a SERB-NPDF fellow. She is interested in exploring the sensory ecology of stingless bees, especially from the perspective of their foraging strategies and the underlying neuronal mechanisms. She did her PhD from IISc Bangalore on the neurophysiology of hippocampal place cells through modelling studies, followed by a brief stint as a bridging post-doc there, where she studied rodent behaviour using in-vivo electrophysiology. Here, she worked on the neuronal basis of caste systems and vision in Tetragonula iridipennis. She later worked as a DST-Postdoctoral fellow in NCBS. Reshma is currently an Assistant Professor at GITAM School of Science. Aditya’s primary research interest lies in understanding sexual conflict and the scope and extent of sexual selection in animals. His PhD was on understanding the mating system of zebrafish, a sexually monomorphic species. Here, he worked on the mating system and colony dynamics of the Indian social spider Stegodyphus sarasinorum. He later worked as a senior research co-ordinator at Holemathi Nature Foundation. Currently Aditya is working at NCF India and studying large mammal dynamics. Sajesh completed his BS-MS programme from IISER-TVM and carried out studies on orientation flights in honey bees for his Masters thesis. He worked as a project fellow at Azim Premji University from 2016-2017 with Dr. Divya Uma looking at the perception of ants by jumping spiders and aggressive behavioural mimicry in ant-mimicking spiders. He joined the lab for a Ph.D to work on the behavioural and visual ecology of Apis dorsata. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Western University, with Dr. Mhatre in Ontario, Canada. Sangeetha has joined our lab in 2023 as a Nava Kerala Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She obtained her Ph.D from Central University of Kerala, focusing on the ecological interactions between wild plant community and floral visitors in agricultural landscapes of Kerala. Her postdoctoral research focuses on investigating the effect of domesticated beehives on plant-pollinator interaction networks. Her primary areas of research interests include plant-pollinator interactions, pollinator conservation, and bee taxonomy. Asmi completed her BS-MS from IISER Pune. For her master’s dissertation, she worked on a project aimed at partitioning the contribution of intraspecific and interspecific variation in community-weighted mean and functional diversity of leaf functional traits in three habitats in a community that are in a gradient of light and water. For her PhD she worked on the visual ecology of the Indian stingless bee, Tetragonula iridipennis, she successfully defended her thesis on the 3rd of July 2023. She rejoined the plan as a post-doctoral researcher and worked on understanding the effect of pesticides on the native honeybee species in India. Asmi currently works as a Dairy Instructor with the Kerala Dairy Farmers Welfare Board.
Balamurali G S
PhD student
His research explores how environmental changes, including climate change and anthropogenic stressors, affect animal decision-making and behavior, particularly in insect pollinators. 
Shivani Krishna
PhD student 
Bharat Parthasarathy
PhD student 
Divya Bellur Uma
Post-doc 
Baheerathan M
PhD student 
Reshma Basak
Post-Doctoral Fellow 
Dr. Aditya Ghoshal
Sajesh Vijayan
PhD student 
Dr. Sangeetha Varma
Postdoctoral Fellow 
Asmi Jezeera M
Post-doctoral Fellow
Behavioural and Evolutionary Ecology Laboratory