My expertise and passion lie primarily in the field of animal behaviour, and its overlap with community interactions, population dynamics, and human-wildlife interactions. I enjoy working on collaborative projects that bring together these varied perspectives in ecology and conservation. My research philosophy allows me to explore and contribute to science by prioritizing question over species, an approach that has expanded my scientific toolkit and enabled me to study a wide range of species and habitats.
CURRENT RESEARCH
Recent interests include examining mechanisms that underlie human-wildlife interactions. This is a monumental problem throughout India and other parts of the world, with huge costs to both human lives and livelihoods, and wildlife and natural resources. As human-use landscapes increasingly eat into natural habitats, it is only expected that animals searching for food, shelter, or mates, are bound to find agricultural areas and garbage dumps around town. Major economic loss from damage to crops, deaths from retaliatory killings, and a diminishing socio-cultural connection with nature are pressing concerns. While these problems may not be fully eliminated, through innovative and scientific solutions, they can and should be minimized.
Towards this goal, I currently work with WWF-India and collaborators to design and implement studies on habitat management and human-elephant interactions in the Western Ghats landscape. Heavily fragmented forests in the region create a loss both in quantity and quality of habitats. Invasive plant species like Lantana camara often outcompete native plant species and typically tend to do more harm than good. Understanding functional responses of wildlife to these modified landscapes is key to identify, predict, and consequently minimize potential conflict. We’re studying elephant movement patterns through radio-telemetry and assessing efficient methods for both lantana removal and subsequent regeneration of native vegetation and its effects on wildlife use patterns.
DOCTORAL RESEARCH
I am intrigued by signalling and information transfer between predator and prey (you’ll see why in my story). Why do species use a signal only in a certain context and not in others? For example, why do we hear frogs croaking more in the monsoon than the rest of the year? Why do squirrels usually run up a tree and bark, but not from the ground where they were feeding? Why did that signal evolve, or get selected for, over others, or, what makes it better than other signals for that particular context? What do I mean by ‘better’?
As with most things in life, there is more than one way to answer these questions. One approach is field research, going outdoors and collecting data on the species of interest through systematic experimental designs. Being outdoors observing nature is one of the reasons I do what I do, and all my early experiences were geared towards this method. However, before I started applying for PhD programs, I audited a Theoretical Ecology course. It blew my mind. To understand a basic ecology concept, something I read about in my first textbooks and am familiar with, through a different perspective, through logic and math and game theory felt like a revelation. I wanted to explore this a bit more.
For my PhD, I used both theory and field research to understand aspects of predator-prey signalling. I had two main projects:
Using game theory to model the evolution of a ‘pursuit-deterrent’ signal
Conduct field experiments to examine whether tail-flashing by dark-eyed juncos in the winter is an anti-predator signal
Simply put, we found that a pursuit-deterrent signal can and does evolve to a stable solution (game theory speak), and that tail-flashing in wintering juncos is likely to be a pursuit-deterrent signal. The signalling model is published in Animal Behaviour, and the tail-flashing study published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology!
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MASTERS RESEARCH
I studied the population size, habitat use, and behaviour of the Indian desert jird in Kachchh, Gujarat. The desert jird is a small social rodent commonly found in the area but in possible decline as agricultural practices take over more land. Not enough is known about its basic ecology, what kind of habitat it's more likely to occur in, the average population size of a colony, if there are any differences between colonies near agriculture fields and undisturbed natural areas, how much time they spend foraging or vigilant, and other curiosities.
I addressed some of these questions in my project, and a key contribution was the development of an abundance index to estimate of the number of individuals in a colony based on the number of burrow entrance holes above ground. This is published in Population Ecology.