Anshuman Swain

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Michigan

We investigated mate size preferences in olive ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea), one of the world's smallest and most abundant sea turtle species, using data from two years near a single mass nesting site. Even though past research has focused on many aspects of the reproductive biology of these turtles, not much is known about their mate...

The microfossil record contains abundant, diverse, and well‐preserved fossils spanning multiple trophic levels from primary producers to apex predators. In addition, microfossils often constitute and are preserved in high abundances alongside continuous high‐resolution geochemical proxy records. These characteristics mean that microfossils can prov...

Due to their large size and obligate nature, Cymothoid isopods inflict a high degree of tissue damage to fish. Still, they are understudied at an ecosystem level despite their global presence and ecological role. In this work, we collected fish host‐isopod parasite data, along with their life history and ecological traits, from the northern part of...

Much of what we know about terrestrial life during the Carboniferous Period comes from Middle Pennsylvanian (~315–307 Mya) Coal Measures deposited in low-lying wetland environments1–5. We know relatively little about terrestrial ecosystems from the Early Pennsylvanian, which was a critical interval for the diversification of insects, arachnids, tet...

The influence of climate on deep-time plant–insect interactions is becoming increasingly well known, with temperature, CO2 increases (and associated stoichiometric changes in plants) and aridity, likely playing a critical role. In our modern climate, all three factors are shifting at an unprecedented rate with uncertain consequences for biodiversit...

In West Africa, malaria is one of the leading causes of disease-induced deaths. Existing studies indicate that as urbanization increases, there is corresponding decrease in malaria prevalence. However, in malaria-endemic areas, the prevalence in some rural areas is sometimes lower than in some peri-urban and urban areas. Therefore, the relationship...

Patterns in parasite diversity are shaped by their environmental and ecological settings, and to better understand their interactions with hosts and the corresponding biology, it is crucial to understand these context-dependent patterns. To achieve this, we use cymothoid isopods, an important group of fish parasites, to test a long-standing hypothe...

In palaeontological studies, groups with consistent ecological and morphological traits across a clade’s history (functional groups)¹ afford different perspectives on biodiversity dynamics than do species and genera2,3, which are evolutionarily ephemeral. Here we analyse Triton, a global dataset of Cenozoic macroperforate planktonic foraminiferal o...

Endophytic feeding behaviors, including stem borings and galling, have been observed in the fossil record from as early as the Devonian and involve the consumption of a variety of plant (and fungal) tissues. Historically, the exploitation of internal stem tissues through galling has been well documented as emerging during the Pennsylvanian (c. 323–...

Temporal patterns of plant–insect interactions are readily observed within fossil datasets but spatial variability is harder to disentangle without comparable modern methods due to limitations in preservation. This is problematic as spatial variability influences community structure and interactions. To address this we replicated paleobotanical met...

The geographic ranges of marine organisms, including planktonic foraminifera¹, diatoms, dinoflagellates², copepods³ and fish⁴, are shifting polewards owing to anthropogenic climate change⁵. However, the extent to which species will move and whether these poleward range shifts represent precursor signals that lead to extinction is unclear⁶. Understa...

Plants and their insect herbivores have been a dominant component of the terrestrial ecological landscape for the past 410 million years and feature intricate evolutionary patterns and co‐dependencies. A complex systems perspective allows for both detailed resolution of these evolutionary relationships as well as comparison and synthesis across sys...

This study explores the relationships between peer-to-peer interactions and (1) group formation among students, (2) choice of research, and (3) course performance in an online asynchronous ecology course at a research-intensive university. Peer-to-peer interactions have been known to enhance learning experience for students in a wide array of conte...

The Upper Geyser Basin at Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming, USA) harbors the greatest concentration of geysers worldwide. Research suggests that individual geysers are not isolated but rather are hydraulically connected in the subsurface with other geysers and thermal springs. To quantify such connections, we combined techniques from machine lear...

Plants and their insect herbivores have been a dominant component of the terrestrial ecological landscape for the past 410 million years and feature intricate evolutionary patterns and co-dependencies. A complex systems perspective allows for both detailed resolution of these evolutionary relationships as well as comparison and synthesis across sys...

In West Africa, malaria is a leading cause of disease-induced fatalities. While it is generally thought that urbanization reduces malaria incidence, the relationship between urbanicity, i.e., the impact of living in urban areas, and transmission remains unclear. This study aims to explore this association in Ghana, using eight district-level datase...

In animal societies, individuals may take on different roles to fulfil their own needs and the needs of their group. Ant colonies display high levels of organizational complexity, with ants fulfilling different roles at different timescales (what is known as task allocation). Factors affecting task allocation can be at the individual level (e.g. ph...

Significance Fire and logging reduce the carbon stored in Amazon forests, but the long-term impact of forest degradation on animal communities remains unclear. We recorded thousands of hours of ecosystem sounds to investigate the acoustic fingerprint of the animal community in degraded Amazon forests following fire and logging. The emergent 24-h pa...

Understanding noise in networks and finding the right scale to represent a system are important problems in network biology. Most research focuses on the raw, micro‐scale network from data/simulations and seldom explores the scale dependence of properties. Here, we introduce the einet package, which looks at the most informative scale in a biologic...

Significance Persistently diverse microbial communities are one of biology’s great puzzles. Using a modeling framework that accommodates high mutation rates and a continuum of species traits, we studied microbial communities in which antagonistic interactions occur via the production of, inhibition of, and vulnerability to toxins (e.g., antibiotics...

The internal workings of biological systems are notoriously difficult to understand. Due to the prevalence of noise and degeneracy in evolved systems, in many cases the workings of everything from gene regulatory networks to protein-protein interactome networks remain black boxes. One consequence of this black-box nature is that it is unclear at wh...

Protein–protein interaction (PPI) networks represent complex intra-cellular protein interactions, and the presence or absence of such interactions can lead to biological changes in an organism. Recent network-based approaches have shown that a phenotype’s PPI network’s resilience to environmental perturbations is related to its placement in the tre...

Ancient plant–insect herbivore associations can be studied directly through observation of feeding damage scars on well-preserved leaf adpression fossils. Early work on insect herbivory was largely qualitative and descriptive. The establishment of the insect damage census protocol by Wilf and Labandeira in 1999 modernized the study of ancient insec...

Perception is central to the survival of an individual for many reasons, especially as it affects the ability to gather resources. Consequently, costs associated with perception are partially shaped by resource availability. Understanding the interplay of environmental factors (such as the density and distribution of resources) with species-specifi...

Plant–insect associations have been a significant component of terrestrial ecology for more than 400 Myr. Exploring these interactions in the fossil record through novel perspectives provides a window into understanding evolutionary and ecological forces that shaped these interactions. For the past several decades, researchers have documented, desc...

Modularity and organizational hierarchy are important concepts in understanding the structure and evolution of interactions in complex biological systems. In this work, we introduce and use a spectral characterization measure (Spectral Entropy) to quantify modularity in protein-to-protein interaction (PPI) networks in species across the tree of lif...

In animal societies, individuals may take on different roles to fulfil their own needs and the needs of their groups. Ant colonies display high levels of organisational complexity, with ants fulfilling different roles at different timescales (what is known as task allocation ). Factors affecting task allocation can be at the individual level (e.g.,...

Network inference is a major field of interest for the ecological community, especially in light of the high cost and difficulty of manual observation, and easy availability of remote, long term monitoring data. In addition, comparing across similar network structures, especially with spatial, environmental, or temporal variability and, simulating...

Exceptionally preserved fossil sites have allowed specimen-based identification of trophic interactions to which network analyses have been applied. However, network analyses of the fossil record suffer from incomplete and indirect data, time averaging that obscures species coexistence, and biases in preservation. Here, we present a high-resolution...

Safeguarding tropical forest biodiversity requires solutions for monitoring ecosystem composition over time. In the Amazon, logging and fire reduce forest carbon stocks and alter tree species diversity, but the long-term consequences for wildlife remain unclear, especially for lesser-known taxa. Here, we combined data from multi-day acoustic survey...

The assembly and maintenance of microbial diversity in natural communities, despite the abundance of toxin-based antagonistic interactions, presents major challenges for biological understanding. A common framework for investigating such antagonistic interactions involve cyclic dominance games with pairwise interactions. The incorporation of higher...

Analyses of ancient food webs reveal important paleoecological processes and responses to a range of perturbations throughout Earth's history, such as climate change. These responses can inform our forecasts of future biotic responses to similar perturbations. However, previous analyses of ancient food webs rarely accounted for key differences betw...

Insofar as methane was the predominant greenhouse gas of the Archean and early Proterozoic eons, its wax and wane in Earth’s atmosphere would have contributed to climate change and the relative flux of harmful UV radiation to surface environments. If correct, understanding the first-order environmental controls (e.g., O 2 or resource concentration)...

Carbon Use Efficiency (CUE) is a popular concept for measuring the efficiency of biomass production in different biological systems and, is frequently employed to understand effects of microbial processes on soil carbon dynamics. CUE in soil microbes is often measured through respiration-based studies, especially through the addition of a labile ca...

The Cambrian Period (541-485 Mya) represents a major stage in the development of metazoan-dominated assemblages with complex community structure and species interactions. Exceptionally preserved fossil sites have allowed specimen-based identification of putative trophic interactions to which network analyses have been applied. However, network anal...

Roughly 10% of the Earth's surface is permanently covered by glaciers and ice sheets and in mountain ecosystems, this proportion of ice cover is often even higher. From an ecological perspective, ice-dominated ecosystems place harsh controls on life including cold temperature, limited nutrient availability, and often prolonged darkness due to snow...

Animals tend to learn and make decisions inductively, and simple, individual-level behavioural decisions can scale up to yield interesting emergent properties at the population level. The minority game is a theoretical formulation based on the principle of inductive learning, wherein a group of individuals, each facing two equivalent choices, self-...

The Warburg effect refers to a curious behavior observed in many organisms and cell types including cancer cells, yeast and bacteria, wherein both the efficient aerobic pathway and the inefficient fermentation pathway are utilized for respiration, despite the presence of ample oxygen. Also termed as overflow metabolism in bacteria, this phenomena h...

Determination of competition coefficients constitutes a vital part in the competition-based Lotka-Volterratype population dynamics models. Various models have been proposed for the same, some of which were instinctive formulations, while some others were derived from dynamical and equilibrium relations pertaining to population dynamics. In this wor...

This proposal gives an insight into how abiogeneis might have taken place.

Substrate Induced Respiration (SIR) is a standard method to study microbial biomass in soil. It is observed that the soil microbial CO 2 respiration goes up with the glucose concentration till a certain concentration, and afterwards decreases and stabilizes. There are two possible mechanisms via which this can happen: increased osmotic pressure can...

A standardization protocol was designed for measurement of the microbial biomass in the soil using the substrate induced respiration (SIR) method. Each part of the standard protocol usually followed in the SIR (Anderson and Domsch, 1978) was reviewed and certain changes were made keeping in mind efficacy in result & analysis and also easier laborat...