Author: beelab

Aditya Ghosal and Reshma Basak joined the lab as post-docs in August 2020 Aditya is interested in  social spiders and Reshma will explore olfactory behaviour of stingless bees.

Prof. Hema Somanathan @somanathan_hema has been awarded the Mercator fellowship from DFG @dfg_public, Germany. As a Mercartor fellow she will be a visiting professor at Biocentrum, University of Würzburg, Germany for three years. @tvmiiser @bio_iisertvm https://t.co/Q4EDzj8ZJ0 pic.twitter.com/iYN7jeP01i

— School of Biology, IISER-Thiruvananthapuram (@bio_iisertvm) June 24, 2021

We had three eminent visual ecology experts from the Lund University, Sweden (Prof. Dan-Eric Nilsson) and SOKENDAI – The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan (Prof. Michiyo Kinoshita and Prof. Kentaro Arikawa) visiting our lab from February 21st to 27th. The School of Biology hosted a seminar series where they delivered talks covering various topics focussing on animal vision. Michiyo discussed “Innate colour preference of Papilio butterflies” where she focussed on the interaction between vision and olfaction in butterflies. Dan explained the “Evolution of the eyes” where he detailed how and when low-resolution vision evolved in invertebrates and how that formed the basis for the high-resolution animal eyes. Kentaro discussed the “Physiology of butterfly colour vision” where he explained how the anatomy and neurophysiology of the butterfly compound eyes could be correlated with their ability to discriminate different colours.

We are really happy to announce that Baheerathan is amongst the 13 recipients who have been selected for Bat Conservation International’s (BCI) student scholarships for 2020. This is a timely recognition of the work that Bahee has been engaged in on understanding the behaviour of fruit bats in India. The tweet from BCI announcing the award is below:

Announcing the 2020 recipients of BCI’s Student Research Scholarship for Global Bat Conservation Priorities! These emerging scholars provide ideas and work of great value to the scientific community and bat conservation across the globe. Read more here: https://t.co/ihOiZ36KUk pic.twitter.com/JQ3adH2wX9

— Bat Conservation Int (@BatConIntl) February 6, 2020

Tropical Pollination Biology Meeting is being organised as a platform to exchange ideas, share knowledge and foster meaningful collaborations between scientists and organisations working in the broad realm of pollination biology. The meeting is being held under the aegis of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and organised by Dr Hema Somanathan (IISER TVM) and Dr Almut Kelber (Lund University, Sweden).

The focus of the meeting is pollination ecology, conservation of pollinators and their habitats, and behavioural ecology of pollinator species in the tropics. To this end, the meeting will host a variety of talks by scientists (from India and Sweden) as well as organisations which are involved in pollinator conservation. The meeting is being held from 17-18 October, 2019 and will culminate in a discussion session to flesh out future directions of research which will improve our understanding of pollination biology.

Hema  attended the Fourth International Conference on Invertebrate Vision (ICIV 2019) where she presented “Senses and signals: how a floral colour changing tree entices bees”. Asmi‘s poster titled “Chromatic and achromatic thresholds of Tetragonula iridipennis” was also presented.

#ICIV2019 @somanathan_hema How trees entice bees by advertising old flowers! It is a puzzle until she shows that yellow flowers serve as long-distance attractors. Very cool demonstration of signal tuning using colors and rewards to exploit color vision systems pic.twitter.com/b3YcA2Tmnk

— Marguerite Butler (@mbutler808) August 11, 2019

We are really happy and proud to share the good news that Shivani has joined Ashoka University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology. For those of us who know Shivani well, it has been a pleasure to work with her, and this is very encouraging for all here. We are certain that she will make an excellent role model and mentor in the years to come. Wish you all the very best, Dear Shivani!

The Ecological Society of IISER-TVM (ESI) and the BEE Lab organised an interactive session for the students to get to know more about honey bees in general, and the giant honey bees (which are found on campus) in particular. The session addressed the need to co-exist with the bees, which have been reported to be sharply declining across the country, following which Hema and Dr Ravi Maruthachalam interacted with the students. Hema spoke about the need to conserve and co-exist with the bees, and Ravi gave interesting insights into honey collection from different part of the world, and the biochemical properties of honey which confers its medicinal properties.