Introduction

We are a smallish group. We have a very broad interest within the field of Evolutionary Biology. Essentially anything interesting within the broader framework of Evolutionary Biology (sometimes even beyond that) interests us. Broadly, I am interested in Sexual selection, evolution of aging and life-history, experimental evolution. That said, the interest of the lab depends on the current members' curiosity. Currently we are mostly preoccupied with aggression, phenotypic plasticity, sexual selection played out in a group of genetically related individuals and non-genetically inherited paternal effect on fitness related traits. In one of the long term project of the lab, we are looking at the connection between aging and sexual selection. We use fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) as model system. We have a number of unique laboratory adapted populations of these flies. We use them to run experiments investigating various questions pertaining to Life-history and Sexual selection, including the above mentioned issues.

Life-history:

Life-history (LH), the scheduling of birth and death throughout the life of an organism, is an interesting window through which adaptive evolution can be viewed. Various traits constitute LH of an organism - life-span and rate of aging, age at on-set and cessation of reproduction, scheduling of reproduction, development time, body size etc. LH is a product of past adaptation and the present biology of the organism and is a fine tuned optimization of a host of traits. Therefore our understanding of adaptive evolution critically depends on the understanding of the entire network of LH-traits and LH-related traits that make up the organism. Many of the LH traits are interesting on their own merit - life-span and stress resistance being two prime examples.

Sexual selection:

In addition to Natural selection (NS), Sexually reproducing organisms are subjected to a particular type of selection - one that relates to differential mating and/or fertilization. Such Sexual selection (SS) may play out through choice imposed by the opposite sex or through competition among the rivals within a sex. Over the past several decades, it has been shown that SS can be as much potent an evolutionary force as NS.