Featured below are select news articles about some of the publications from the lab. For some reason, new species descriptions attract a lot of media attention. Our paper describing 9 new species of bush frogs was featured in 8 newspapers/online articles. Our work has also been featured in Nature Research Highlights (Hari Sridhar’s paper in American Naturalist) and Nature Asia (SP Vijayakumar’s recent paper in Proceedings B).
Astrobatrachus kurichiyana
Why frogs can tell you more about the forest than tigers
Shalini Umachandran, Times of India, 2016
Biologists who work on mammals and birds assume there is nothing left to discover but when it comes to smaller vertebrates, people haven’t surveyed the mountains systematically,” says S P Vijayakumar of Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, whose paper on bush frogs of the Western Ghats has been published in the Proceedings of Royal Society (Biological Sciences) this week. “We’ll hear of more frog species over the next five years. The work of the last 15 years is just showing results,” he says. His paper examines the effect of geology (mountains), ecology and climate on the way frog species diverged. Read more. See paper in Proceedings B.
An evolutionary museum of bush frogs
GBSNP Varma, Nature Asia, 2016
“This is the largest vertebrate radiation (a process through which organisms diversify) in the region,”says lead author S. P. Vijayakumar, a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at Indian Institute of Science (IISc).Sampling species from 13 out of 14 group of mountains (or massifs) in the Western Ghats at different heights, they came across an astounding variety of bush frogs from within the same genus Raorchestes — more than 60 species. Searching if they all had a common ancestor, the researchers found a large radiation splitting into two smaller ones — one in the south and the other in the north of the Ghats. The dividing line — the biogeographic barrier — is the Palghat Gap. Read more.
Nine beautiful new frogs found in India's Western Ghats
Richa Malhotra, BBC, 2014
Bush frogs are tiny animals, found mainly in South and South-East Asia, some of which can fit onto a 20 pence coin. Beginning in 2008, S. P. Vijayakumar, then at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, has been scouring the Western Ghats to find them. The new species he has found all belong to the genus Raorchestes, and he has identified them based on their appearance and genetics. Vijayakumar and his colleagues have published their findings in Zootaxa. Read more. See paper in Zootaxa.
Small birds engineer uneasy alliance between hawk and treeshrew
Ed Yong, 2009
Through the branches of the forest, the tiny Nicobar treeshrew scuttles about searching for insects. They’re followed by the racket-tailed drongo, a small bird that picks off juicy morsels flushed out by the foraging treeshrews. So far, this isn’t unusual – many distantly related animals forage together, either because they net more food or because they can watch out for predators. But this alliance has a third an altogether more surprising member – a sparrowhawk. This bird of prey is five times larger than either of the other two species and can easily kill treeshrews. But it doesn’t…..
Read more. See paper in Biology Letters.