About the painting in the lab logo:

This beautiful Madhubani painting, “The Mimic’s Trail: A Tale of Two Canopies”, created by one of my friends who is working as a government school teacher in Uttar Pradesh, Subhdeep Subham, beautifully combines the traditional folk art with my specific ecological observations of the ant-mimicking spider, Myrmaplata plataleoides. The painting is divided into two distinct plant and animal worlds, with a vibrant crimson border with intricate, characteristic Madhubani line work. The upper half shows the red variant of the spider in the green, luxurient foliage and red, orange and yellow flowers of a Saraca asoca (the true Ashoka) tree, as I saw myself at NCBS, Bengaluru. Here a red male spider with typical elongated chelicerae is seen closely following a red female. The bottom half, however, depicts the black form of the species walking among the magnificent white blossoms with orange tubular base of a Nyctanthes arbor-tristis (night-flowering jasmine) tree, reminding me of one of my encounters with these spiders at the Hazaribagh Wildlife Sanctuary. The black male spider is seen faithfully following the black female, in keeping with their natural behavioural tendencies, putting an interesting bit of real-world arachnid behaviour into a wonderfully stylised, traditional Indian art form. Yes! Our findings demonstrate assortative mating between the "typical" red and the "Hazaribagh" black forms of this spider.