Anindya Sinha

National Institute of Advanced Studies · School of Natural Sciences and Engineering

Many primate species show various behavioural and ecological adaptations to provisioning, one of which is the unusual occurrence of twins. Here, we report observations on two pairs of surviving twins in lion-tailed macaques Macaca silenus in the Anamalai Hills of the Western Ghats, India. The Puthuthottam population of lion-tailed macaques has hist...

Ranging patterns of four focal herds using a plantation-forest matrix of the Valparai plateau was studied by following the individuals on a regular basis, recording all possible sightings, for five years. Although surrounded by a network of protected areas, the focal herds were found to use the plateau extensively. There was minimal spatial overlap...

Human–elephant interrelationships trace back to about 6,000 BCE in Indian rock art, 1,500 to 2,500 BCE in the Indus Valley civilisation or to the Carthaginian era in Europe and north Africa. In modern India, beginning from their role as war animals, domesticated elephants have come a long way, contributing in various ways to the socioeconomic devel...

Frugivorous primates in temperate and subtropical regions often experience a shortage or complete absence of fruits for several months of the year. We studied the foraging ecology of a group of stump-tailed macaques Macaca arctoides in a subtropical forest during winter, when fruit abundance was low. We conducted this study in the Hollongapar Gibbo...

The chapter talks about alternate understanding of wild Asian elephants by local communities in Assam

How closely related species co-exist, especially under conditions of resource limitation remains an intriguing problem in ecology. Having to share space and resources, such species are expected to have evolved a variety of behavioural mechanisms to reduce competition. Understanding such adaptation could also provide clues to designing effective con...

The lion-tailed macaque is an endangered species, endemic to the Western Ghats of southern India. The Anamalai hills harbour 63 groups of the species, several of which occur in rainforest fragments, amidst tea and coffee plantations, on the Valparai plateau. Being highly arboreal, these populations have always been assumed to be largely restricted...

Nonhuman individuals and groups, living in anthropogenic landscapes, often adopt adaptive foraging strategies, mediated by their day-to-day interactions with humans and their artefacts. Exploring such novel behavioral manifestations, especially in the Anthropocene, offers us insights into behavioral innovations and their transmission in such rapidl...

Tool use and manufacture by wild nonhuman primates in nonforaging contexts — an important indicator of their technical intelligence — is widespread across taxa, but is sporadic in occurrence. Such behaviors are usually displayed by one or a few individuals within a population and typically occur in four contexts: aggression, communication and sexua...

The lion-tailed macaque is a gregarious, rainforest-adapted species, that has, in certain locations across its natural distribution, recently begun to explore and utilise surrounding human-dominated habitats. In many primate species, exposure to novel human-use food resources and potential provisioning has previously been associated with changes in...

We recorded the first occurrence of surviving twins in lion-tailed macaques Macaca silenus from the Anamalai hills of the Western Ghats, India. The Puthuthottam population of lion-tailed macaques has historically been restricted to a rainforest fragment measuring 92ha, situated adjacent to human settlements, however, direct interactions between mac...

The ranging patterns of five lion-tailed macaque Macaca silenus troops, forming the Puthuthottam sub-population, were studied over a three year period to determine road/habitation visitation rate, home ranges and habitat preference. Each troop visited the road or human habitation at varying rates, with the largest troop visiting most frequently. Ho...

The tropical lowland rainforests of the Upper Brahmaputra Valley in the northeastern Indian state of Assam have, in the past, and are increasingly being converted to other land-use forms, driven by historical and current anthropogenic factors. Development and the heavy dependence of people on these forests for their daily needs has resulted in the...

This paper seeks to rethink the urban as an ecological formation. It argues that contrary to an emphasis on the built environment, articulated through refrains of capital, planning and design, cities are lived achievements, emerging through fabrications between human and other-than-human forces. Ecological formations are fleshed out in three modes:...

An impetus for growth and development in India, with the second largest human population in the world, has resulted in rapid changes in land use across the country, especially over the last two decades. While the land area under agriculture has only slightly increased, there have been significant changes in the shift from single-cropping to double-...

The musicological analysis of Carnatic music is challenging, owing to its rich structure and complexity. Automated \textit{r\=aga} classification, pitch detection, tonal analysis, modelling and information retrieval of this form of southern Indian classical music have, however, made significant progress in recent times. A causal analysis to investi...

The occurrence, density and survival of a species often depend on various aspects of the habitat that it occupies including patch size and disturbance. The demography of most threatened tropical species largely remain unstudied but could provide valuable information about their biology and insights for their conservation. Our study examined the eff...

How might urban mental health be understood when animals reconfigure human wellbeing in the lived city? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork on people and macaques in New Delhi and forging novel conversations between urban studies, ecology and psychiatry, our ontology of urban mental health moves from lived experience of the built environment to tho...

Very large and stable, socially coherent primate groups, not including fission-fusion societies, are usually rare in nature, owing to constraints imposed by various ecological and social factors. Moreover, unlike species in open habitats, those in forests tend to have smaller groups, and this becomes further accentuated in small and fragmented fore...

Increasing anthropogenic pressures has led to the fragmentation of Asian elephant habitats, affecting their numbers, demography and ranging patterns across their range. Baseline information on the demography and population dynamics of free-ranging Asian elephants is often unavailable. Population monitoring at the landscape level has many constraint...

This study examines the extent and nature of harvest of non-timber forest products (NTFP) by local human communities residing adjacent to the Hollongapar Gibbon Sanctuary in the Upper Brahmaputra Valley of Assam, northeastern India. The harvest of NTFP was monitored at 15 entry points to the sanctuary over a period of 41 days. Dry timber was the mo...

With the uncontrolled expansion of anthropogenic modifications of the environment, wildlife species are forced to interact with humans, often leading to conflict situations that have detrimental effects for both wildlife and humans. Such interactions are escalating globally, making it crucial for us to devise strategies for both, the management of...

A group of Indian scientists including botanists, entomologists, ornithologists, mammalogists, herpetologists, aquatic fauna specialists, hydrologists, geographers, and social scientists, many with research experience in northeastern India, including the Dibang Valley in Arunachal Pradesh, have conducted a peer-review of the Technical Report prepar...

A group of Indian scientists including botanists, entomologists, ornithologists, mammalogists, herpetologists, aquatic fauna specialists, hydrologists, geographers, and social scientists, many with research experience in northeastern India, including the Dibang Valley in Arunachal Pradesh, have conducted a peer-review of the Technical Report prepar...

Crop-foraging by primates is a rapidly growing concern. Effective mitigation strategies are urgently required to resolve this issue. In the Garhwal Himalayas, local people's high dependency on forest resources is a major cause of habitat loss, which paves the way for human-primate interactions in this area. To investigate the socioeconomic factors...

The biodiversity of freshwater aquatic ecosystems is threatened by invasive alien species across the world. We studied the impact of the presence of an invasive piscine species, the tilapia Oreochromis mossambicus and acquisition of familiarity with it on the social decision-making and exploratory behaviour of a native, air-breathing, freshwater fi...

The paper traces the history of captive elephants and their association with temples, with particular focus on the ones in the southern Indian state of Kerala.

Nonhuman primate gestures are believed to be crucial evolutionary precursors of human language. Comparative studies on primate gestures in an evolutionary framework have, however, remained largely restricted to the great apes and the potential flexibility and richness of gestural communication in monkeys, especially in the wild, continue to be virt...

Male Asian elephants are known to adopt a high-risk high-gain foraging strategy by venturing into agricultural areas and feeding on nutritious crops in order to improve their reproductive fitness. We hypothesised that the high risks to survival posed by increasingly urbanising and often unpredictable production landscapes may necessitate the emerge...

Comparative studies of closely related species with similar ecological requirements are essential to understand the behavioral adaptations that allow them to live in sympatry. We investigated the mechanisms that enable the coexistence of two congeneric macaques—the Assamese macaque (Macaca assamensis) and rhesus macaque (M. mulatta)—in the Western...

A unique piscine behaviour, collection and temporary storage of food materials inside the mouth during times of availability and particularly in response to starvation, has been reported in a single species, the climbing perch Anabas testudineus. In this study, we documented a significant variation in the amount of food collected by populations of...

The future of agriculture in India will be affected by substantial changes in the environment, although not uniformly across the country. These changes, as projected by the well-known General Circulation Model will grossly impact the food-cropping system. While developing adaptation strategies, it would be useful to understand the current climatic...

Urban animals and their political ecologies constitute an arena of geographical scholarship that has intensified in recent years. Yet, little headway has been made in terms of understanding how sentient creatures inhabit and negotiate dynamic, metabolic environments. Focusing on urban macaques in Indian cities, the paper develops a conversation bet...

Increasing anthropogenic pressures on forests, especially in the tropical regions of the world, have restricted several large mammalian species such as the Asian elephant to fragmented habitats within human-dominated landscapes. In this study, we assessed the effects of an anthropogenic landscape and its associated conflict with humans on the physi...

Comparative studies of nonhuman communication systems could provide insights into the origins and evolution of a distinct dimension of human language: intentionality. Recent studies have provided evidence for intentional communication in different species but generally in captive settings. We report here a novel behaviour of food requesting from hu...

Urban animals and their political ecologies constitute an arena of geographical scholarship that has intensified in recent years. Yet, little headway has been made in terms of understanding how sentient creatures inhabit and negotiate dynamic, metabolic environments. Focusing on urban macaques in Indian cities, the paper develops a conversation bet...

The pressures of developing and maintaining intricate social relationships may have led to the evolution of enhanced cognitive abilities in many social nonhuman species, particularly primates. Knowledge of the dominance ranks and social relationships of other individuals, for example, is important in evaluating one’s position in the prevailing affi...

Phenotypic plasticity refers to the phenotypic variability expressed by single genotypes, through developmental processes, in response to varying ecological, social, or prenatal environmental conditions. Phenotypic flexibility, in contrast, is a form of context-dependent, often reversible, variation in behavior, shown by individual primates, in res...

Nonhuman primates have coexisted with humans in urban habitats since historical times. While primate responses to human disturbances are variable and species-specific, certain populations have adapted ecologically, behaviorally, or physiologically and appear to thrive in urban landscapes, depending on the availability, quality, and quantity of reso...

Intentional referential gestures, a fundamental building block of symbolic human language, have been reported from a range of species, including non-human primates. While apes are known to spontaneously use intentional gestures, only captive macaques, amongst non-ape primates, appear to intentionally display learnt gestures. On the other hand, refe...

Human-rhesus macaque conflict due to crop raiding is a major problem affecting northern India, particularly the states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Management techniques are challenging both due to the commensal nature of the macaque as well as the culturally significant status of the species in India. Studies on wildlife crop raiding indic...

In this study we showed that a freshwater fish, the climbing perch (Anabas testudineus) is incapable of using chemical communication but employs visual cues to acquire familiarity and distinguish a familiar group of conspecifics from an unfamiliar one. Moreover, the isolation of olfactory signals from visual cues did not affect the recognition and...

Physical and ecological factors such as season, rainfall, food availability, number of plant species eaten, intergroup encounters, and degree of terrestriality influence the daily path length (DPL) and home range use of animals. We examined whether these factors influenced DPL and home range use in a group of endemic lion-tailed macaques (Macaca si...

Multiple factors, including climate change, dispersal barriers, and social behavior influence the genetic structure of natural populations. While the effects of extrinsic factors such as historical climatic change and habitat topography have been well studied, mostly in temperate habitats, the simultaneous effects of intrinsic factors such as socia...

Consciousness in humans is best understood by the expression of individual goals and intentions, as expressed through language. The lack of a common language between humans and nonhuman animals and the historical tradition of attributing a mind exclusively to humans have, however, traditionally hindered the search for animal consciousness. Although...

In this study, we computationally investigate decision-making by individuals and the ensuing social structure of a primate species, chimpanzees, using Newton’s equations of classical mechanics, as opposed to agentbased analyses in which individual chimpanzees make independent decisions. Our model uses molecular dynamics simulation techniques to sol...

Quaternary glacial oscillations are known to have caused population size fluctuations in many temperate species. Species from subtropical and tropical regions are, however, considerably less studied, despite representing most of the biodiversity hotspots in the world including many highly threatened by anthropogenic activities such as hunting. Thes...

A 'predator' is defined as 'an animal that naturally preys on others' 1 . Wild boars Sus scrofa are generally not recorded as natural predators of bonnet macaques, Macaca radiata. We report here an adult wild boar hunting and eating an adult bonnet macaque in the Reception area (11.67N, 76.63E) of the Bandipur National Park, Karnataka on 5 Decemb...

This volume is a collection of 23 essays that contribute to the emerging discipline of consciousness studies with particular focus on the concept of the self. The essays together argue that to understand consciousness is to understand the self that beholds consciousness. Two broad issues are addressed in the volume: the place of the self in the liv...

The pressures of developing and maintaining intricate social relationships may have led to the evolution of enhanced cognitive abilities in many social nonhuman species, particularly primates. Knowledge of the dominance ranks and social relationships of other individuals, for example, is important in evaluating one’s position in the prevailing affi...

Habitat fragmentation affects species distribution and abundance, and drives extinctions. Escalated tropical deforestation and fragmentation have confined many species populations to habitat remnants. How worthwhile is it to invest scarce resources in conserving habitat remnants within densely settled production landscapes? Are these fragments fate...

In human-dominated landscapes, interactions and perceptions towards wildlife are influenced by multidimensional drivers. Understanding these drivers could prove useful for wildlife conservation. We surveyed the attitudes and perceptions of fishers towards threatened Irrawaddy dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris) at Chilika Lagoon India. To validate the...

Rhesus and bonnet macaques are among the most common primates found in India and have been categorised as being of Least Concern by the IUCN. Despite the wealth of information on their ecology and behaviour, little attention has been paid to their demography or population status. We studied the demographic status of the two species along their comm...

Various ecological factors shape the structure and dynamics of primate societies, and many of these are increasingly being influenced by anthropogenic processes. The bonnet macaque Macaca radiata, endemic to peninsular India, usually lives in seasonal tropical deciduous forests and typically occurs in large multimale–multifemale associations. A par...

The invasion of alien faunal species and the consequent modification of the dynamics of inter-and intra-species interactions is a serious environmental issue faced by most aquatic ecosystems throughout the world. Research on the impact of alien invasive fish on the behaviour and cognitive abilities of indigenous piscine species, in particular, is o...

In tropical biodiversity hotspots, with diverse biota and high endemism, there are several factors that affect existence of species. Habitat loss by deforestation, fragmentation and degradation by disturbance are some of the more commonly documented processes that affect species. In the unique Shola habitat on the sky islands of Western Ghats, we e...

The concept of this book arises from a symposium entitled "Human-Macaque Interactions: Traditional and Modern Perspectives on Cooperation and Conflict " organized at the 23rd Congress of the International Primatological Society, that was held in Kyoto in September 2010. The symposium highlighted the many aspects of human-macaque relations and some...

Background: A dearth in understanding the behavior of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) at the scale of populations and individuals has left important management issues, particularly related to human-elephant conflict (HEC), unresolved. Evaluation of differences in behavior and decision-making among individual elephants across groups in response t...

Classification trees for residence time of female and male elephants in the different strata. The trees depict the influence of (a) shade availability and (b) human disturbance. The y-axis of each graph indicates the proportion of groups observed in the different strata. (TIF)