This thesis describes the first detailed quantitative study of female Asian elephant social organisation in India. Social organisation may be shaped by ecological factors and individual relationships, and understanding ...

Majority of life forms have been observed to exhibit circadian (Latin: circa = about/approximately; diēs = day) rhythmicity in behaviour and physiological processes driven by underlying circadian clocks, and has been the ...

The Asian elephant is a flagship species for conservation in tropical Asia, but reliable population estimates are available only from a few populations. This is because the species can be elusive and occurs at low densities ...

We studied communal roosting in the Common Myna (Acridotheres tristis) in the light of the recruitment centre hypothesis and predation at the roost. The number and sizes of flocks departing from and arriving at focal roosts ...

In the absence of large sample sizes, logistic difficulties, and, more importantly, knowledge about appropriate hypotheses to test cognition in elephants, reliable anecdotal observations from field studies are increasingly ...

Since the ability to time rhythmic behaviours in accordance with cyclic environments is likely to confer adaptive advantage to organisms, the underlying clocks are believed to be selected for stability in timekeeping over ...

Following decades of research under controlled laboratory conditions, there has been growing interest in the recent past to study circadian rhythms in nature. Recent studies conducted under natural conditions have been ...

Previously we have reported that selection for faster pre-adult development in fruit flies speeded-up development by similar to 29-h and shortened the clock period (tau) by similar to 0.5 h, which suggests that development ...

Insects including the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster are under intense pressure to develop rapidly because they inhabit ephemeral habitats. We have previously shown that when selection for faster development was ...

The standard view of adaptation to larval crowding in fruitflies, built on results from 25 years of multiple experimental evolution studies on Drosophila melanogaster, was that enhanced competitive ability evolves primarily ...