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.
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.
Shivani’s study explores the strategies that permit successful pollination by deceit in a dioecious swamp specialist species. Male trees produce 1000 times more flowers than female plants, and they flower for a longer duration. Pollinators cannot distinguish between the male and female flowers, and this leads to chance visits to female flowers, thus leading to successful pollination.