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: A big congratulations to Sonali for receiving one of the five HUL fellowships for Women in Stem! See her in the Times of India Article here.
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!
If you want to read Old News, head over here