News

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.

Three project openings have opened up in  the BEE Lab! Check out the Openings page for more details.

Asmi and Sajesh attended the international postgraduate course on  Sensory Ecology at Lund University, Sweden from 24 September to 7 October 2018.  Asmi presented her poster on “Spatial resolution of Indian stingless bee, Tetragonula iridipennis” and Sajesh on “Nest site choice in the giant honey bee Apis dorsata“.

Njut av!

On 26th September, Bharat successfully defended his PhD thesis before his  opponent Prof. Mewa Singh from the University of Mysore and his examiners committee. Bharat’s thesis titled ‘Collective behavior in the inbred social spider, Stegodyphus sarasinorum’ covered the dispersal dynamics, personality types, intra-individual plasticity in prey-capture, prey-type based contextual differences in group hunting and finally the social networks among the social spiders S. sarasinorum. After an elaborate presentation followed by questions and interesting discussions which went for more than an hour, Bharat has now become the third successful graduate student from the BEE Lab with two published papers and three more in the pipeline.