Research Projects

Protected forests are constantly exposed to disturbances such as forest fire, deforestation, and waste dumping. These disturbances make habitats modified, biodiversity altered, and ecosystem services and functions disrupted. Invasion of tramp/invasive species is one of the crucial outcomes of such disturbances. Invasion is attributed predominantly to the biotic resistance hypothesis (Elton 1958; Carlquist 1965). Poor diversity of species, disharmony in the taxonomic and functional diversity, niche specialization, genetic bottlenecks, and insular evolution can offer poor biotic resistance to an invader (Wilson 1961; Loope and Mueller-Dombois 1989). Tramp/Invasive species can be a subset of both the non-native or native species that can survive and make supercolonies in the invaded areas. The impact of invasive species has received attention for the invasive non-exotic plant species. Many plant species are invaded to the forest ecosystem and changed the food chain and species composition. Many invertebrate species are also coming under the invasive group but received very little attention in the Indian context. Ants around the world are recognized as the biotic indicators of various ecosystem processes and global changes, but have several invasive species of economic importance. Anoplolepis gracilipes – the Yellow-Crazy Ant – is a globally notorious invasive ant species of plausible South Asian origin (IUCN SSC Invasive Species Specialist Group 2012). Although their economic and ecological impacts have been assessed and even measures are taken to manage them in parts of Australia and Indian Oceanic islands and Pacific oceans, they are not investigated for Indian protected forests. In India, they have been so far reported from disturbed habitats (Rajesh et al. 2021). Nevertheless, they can be spilled over to pristine natural and seminatural habitats. In this project, we explore the characteristics of ant communities along a disturbance gradient in the Silent Valley National Park to test the hypothesis that the ant communities characterized by taxonomically and functionally diverse native species resist the invasion of A.gracilipes. The study will analyse the ant communities of the core and buffer areas of Silent Valley National Park in Kerala to test this hypothesis. My preliminary observations are that the buffer zones have human settlements, are used to dump organic wastes, and have A.gracilipes.