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June 2024. Have a look at Suvarna’s article Corruption in permanent faculty recruitment in Indian state universities In the online publication The Print. Linked here
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June 2024. Shreya’s article about nightlife at IISc came out in this months issue of the campus magazine Connect. See page 31 here
June 2024: Some of us went to the Indian wildlife conference where Suvarna gave a talk about the effects of size and degradation on the dung beetle communities in sacred groves, and Sonali gave a talk on the her study of effects of long term grazing exclusion on a grassland plant community.
May 2024. Saskya gives a talk in the Atria University symposium on species interaction, genetic legacy, & biogeography, Bangalore, India. “Using ecological theory for biological control of insect pests.”
April 2024: We presented three talks and a poster at CATs the annual Department Symposium:
Patterns of biodiversity along a habitat and disturbance gradient of Sacred groves in Western Ghats, India, by Suvarna.
How grazers shape arid grassland plant community, by Sonali.
Effect of intraspecific competition in resource utilisation of parasitoids, by Prabitha.
Butterfly – Parasitoid Communities associated with Rutaceae family, by Tapasya, Anaswar and Saskya
March 2024: Camila’s Essay titled My productivity waxes and wanes — and I’m learning to account for it was published in the Career column in Nature
March 2024: Camila came in 3rd place for her talk on “Microbiota of an insect community associated with the ribwort plantain is influenced by species and temporal differences, but not habitat disturbance” at the LUOVA Spring Symposium at the University of Helsinki @springsymposium
March 2024: A newspaper article (in Marathi) about Suvarna’s research came out, in honor of Womens day.
Dec. 2023: A profile of our research in the IISc Sciences newsletter titled Hunting strategies of parasitoid wasps
Dec 2023: We received the exciting news that our joint proposal with Israeli collaborators, “AI-assisted insect monitoring for sustainable plant protection in times of change: the Asian citrus psyllid as a case study,” will be funded.
Nov. 2023: Our book chapter on parasitoid population dynamics that has been years in the making is finally published!
Jervis, M.A. Kidd, N.A.C., Mills, N.J., van Nouhuys, S., Singh, A., Yazdani, M. * (2023) Population Dynamics. In: Hardy ICW & Wajnberg E (Eds) Jervis’s Insects as natural enemies: practical perspectives. Springer, Dordrecht.
Nov. 2023: Saskya and colleague Sumanta Bagchi and are excited to be starting to put together a special issue in the journal Ecological Applications on Applied Ecology in India. If you have some interesting work that might fit in, please have a look at the call for papers: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/hub/journal/19395582/call-for-papers/si-2023-000824
Oct. 2023: Watch a 2 minute video about the current collaborative project on the ways butterfly behavior changes with weather. This project is in collaboration with researchers from the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (@RaviJambhekar, @JagdishKrishna8), funded by the Bengaluru Sustainability forum
July 2023: Prabitha presented talk titled Bodyguard manipulation as a parasitoid-induced stress sleep at the 10th congress of the International Society of Hymenopterists in Romania
July 2023: Saskya presented an invited talk titled The roles of parasitoids in butterfly communities at the Biology of butterflies conference in Prague.
June 2023: Ansawar and Shreya attend the Understanding Behavior conference at IISER Kolkata, where Shreya presents a talk on the Masters project she did before joining us, about the effects of larval crowding on adult Drosophila activity level.
June 2023: Saskya participates in the workshop on Theory for Biological Control at the Israeli Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
June 2023: We all attended the Animal Behavior Symposium here in CES, organized by Rohini Balakrishnan‘s lab in honor of 25 years of research on eco-acoustics. Pranoy presented a talk on animal self-medication.
May 2023: Saskya joins the Journal of Animal Ecology as an Associate editor.
April 2023: Congratulations to Nithin Shakti for defended his bachelors thesis titled Modelling perspectives for partial resource use by parasitoid wasps
Feb. 2023: Saskya was part of the a four day zoom workshop, Inclusive Ecology, run by the Centre for Ecological Sciences. The workshop introduced students from under-represented groups to broad concepts and approaches in the fields of Ecology, Evolution, Behaviour, Conservation, and Quantitative Thinking, and to the practicalities of graduate school.
Feb. 2023: Saskya received a three years SERB CORE research grant for the project Community structure and dynamics of parasitoid wasps and their butterfly hosts in a complex ecological system
Feb. 2023: A new paper in collaboration with Ann Hajek and David Harris in Neobiota, on mixed invasive and native host-parasitoid and nematode interactions
Feb. 2023: See our new Forum article in Economic Entomology: Dynamic economic thresholds for agricultural pests and the importance of migration between field and off-field locations by Keasar, T., Wajnberg, E. Heimpel, G., Hardy, Ian C.W., Shaltiel, L., Gottlieb, D., van Nouhuys, S.
January 2023: We are excited to welcome two new NPDF postdocs to the lab. Prabitha Mohan is investigating the role of competition in diet specialization by parasitoids. Suvarna Khadakkar is studying the effects of habitat degradation on dung beetles in sacred groves.
We are also excited to welcome two new PhD students, Shreya Gangwal and Anaswar P. See the People page for all of their bios.
December 2022: Our small grant proposal Climate change and Bengaluru: Applying a biodiversity lens for a sustainable city from the Bengaluru Sustainability Forum with Ravi Jambhekar and Jagdish Krishnaswamy from IHSS was funded! Get ready to see how climate change is changing the behavior of Urban birds and butterflies.
August 2022: New PhD student Sonali has joined the lab! See people page
July 2022: Aditya Nayak joined us as a summer undegraduate intern from IISER Mohali. He did a literature review of change in genome size associated with plant domestication. He also worked on finding local parasitoids of Lepidoptera on Citrus.
June 30th 2022: The Working group on theoretical approaches to biological control and conservation is over. Here is a news article about what we were doing.
May 3rd 2022: A photo of Saskya and Pranoy featured on the running head of the IISc webpage, linking to Saskya as a “woman scientist of IISc” answering some queries about career path and science.
February 2022: The five month working group on theoretical approaches to biological control and conservation at the Israeli Institute of Advanced studies has started. Saskya is spending three weeks there in February, and then going back again in the summer. In between she is participating via Zoom.
February 2022: Our new paper, with Ann Hajek and others, on the association of a nematode and its woodwasp host is out. Look here to see our consideration of how this complex association persists in a natural ecological system.
January 2022: New PhD student Pranoy MS has joined the lab. See people page. Stay tuned for news on what he decides to work on!
October 2021: Saskya has taken a faculty position at the Indian Institute of Science, Centre for Ecological Sciences, in Bangalore, India!
August 2021: Our paper on the ability of a landscape to support higher trophic level species is out:
Wang S, Brose U, van Nouhuys S, Holt R, Loreau M. 2021. Metapopulation capacity determines food chain length in fragmented landscapes. PNAS. This paper presents a model and an empirical test expanding the concept of metapopulation capacity to higher trophic levels.
July 2021: Our paper Long-term spatio-temporal genetic structure of an
accidental parasitoid introduction, and local changes in prevalence of its associated Wolbachia symbiont is in press in Molecular Ecology. This is a project that Anne Duplouy, Abhilash Nair and I have been working on a long time. It is about what happens if 30 years ago some researchers introduced a butterfly, and accidentally also introduced the parasitoid of the butterfly, and the Wolbachia in the parasitoid.
Press release with photos in English here, på svenska här
An article about this paper in The Guardian here, och på svenska här.
April 2021: The website of the The research group Mathematical modelling of biological control interaction to support agriculture and conservation, supported by The Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS) has launched.
Sept. 2020: Our paper using long term data to assessing potential landscape-level effects of plant-pathogen herbivore-parasitoid interactions is out:
Opedal, Øystein H., Ovaskainen, Otso, Saastamoinen, Marjo, Laine, Anna-Liisa, van Nouhuys, Saskya 2020 Host plant availability drives the spatio-temporal dynamics of interacting metapopulations across a fragmented landscape. Ecology in press https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.3186
July 2019: Saskya has the pleasure of visiting the Indian Institute of Science, Centre for Ecological Research (http://ces.iisc.ac.in/new/). In addition to presenting a research seminar:(http://ces.iisc.ac.in/new/?q=node/761 ) I got to see fig wasps in action on a clump of figs on one of the 49 fig trees on the campus.
May 2019: After an exceptionally bad year for the host butterfly, Melitaea cinxia, in Åland, Finland, we were afraid that the parasitoid Cotesia melitaearum might not show up in the spring survey this year, but it came through!
Four Cotesia melitaearum parasitoid cocoons from a single overwintering Melitaea cinxia caterpillar.
August 2018: Our paper on the decline of a hyperparasioid due to increased host butterfly population fluctuation is out:
Nair, A., Nonaka , E., van Nouhuys, S. 2018
Increased fluctuation in a butterfly metapopulation leads to diploid males and decline of a hyperparasitoid
Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Download here
April 2018: Kahilainen, A., van Nouhuys, S., Schulz, T. & Saastamoinen, M. 2018
Metapopulation dynamics in a changing climate: Increasing spatial synchrony in weather conditions drives metapopulation synchrony of a butterfly inhabiting a fragmented landscape.
Global Change Biology. Download here
March 2018: Reudler J. H., van Nouhuys, S. 2018 The roles of foraging environment, host species and host diet for a generalist pupal parasitoid. Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata 10.1111/eea.12657. Download here
