Anuradha Batabyal

FLAME University · Department of Physical and Natural Sciences

There has been a significant increase in the incidence of multiple neurodegenerative and terminal diseases in the human population with life expectancy increasing in the current times. This highlights the urgent need for a more comprehensive understanding of how different aspects of lifestyle, in particular diet, may affect neural functioning and c...

The endocannabinoid system (ECS) plays an important role in neuroprotection, neuroplasticity, energy balance, modulation of stress, and inflammatory responses, acting as a critical link between the brain and the body's peripheral regions, while also offering promising potential for novel therapeutic strategies. Unfortunately, in humans, pharmacolog...

Animals, including humans, learn and remember to avoid a novel food when its ingestion is followed, hours later, by sickness - a phenomenon initially identified during World War II as a potential means of pest control. In the 1960s, John Garcia (for whom the effect is now named) demonstrated that this form of conditioned taste aversion had broader...

Social interactions play an in important role in learning and memory. There is great variability in the literature regarding the effects of social isolation on cognition. Here, we investigated how memory formation was affected when our model system, Lymnaea stagnalis, were socially isolated at three different time periods: before, during, or after...

Predator–prey interactions are a cornerstone of many ecological and evolutionary processes that influence various levels of biological organization, from individuals to ecosystems. Predators play a crucial role in shaping ecosystems through the consumption of prey species and non-consumptive effects. Non-consumptive effects (NCEs) can induce change...

There has been a significant increase in the incidence of multiple neurodegenerative and terminal diseases in the human population with life expectancy increasing in the current times. This highlights the urgent need for a more comprehensive understanding of how different aspects of lifestyle, in particular diet, may affect neural functioning and c...

Lymnaea stagnalis learns and remembers to avoid certain foods when their ingestion is followed by sickness. This rapid, taste-specific, and long-lasting aversion—known as the Garcia effect—can be formed by exposing snails to a novel taste and 1 h later injecting them with lipopolysaccharide (LPS). However, the exposure of snails to acetylsalicylic...

Lymnaea stagnalis is an ecologically important, stress-sensitive, freshwater mollusc that is at risk for exposure to insecticides via agricultural practices. We provide insight into the impact insecticides have on L. stagnalis by comparing specific behaviours including feeding, locomotion, shell regeneration, and cognition between snails collected...

The pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis employs aerial respiration under hypoxia and can be operantly conditioned to reduce this behavior. When applied individually, a heat shock (30 °C for 1 h) and the flavonoid quercetin enhance long-term memory formation for the operant conditioning of aerial respiration. However, when snails are exposed to quercetin b...

Dynamic colour change is widespread in ectothermic animals, but has primarily been studied in the context of background matching. For most species, we lack quantitative data on the extent of colour change across different contexts. It is also unclear whether and how colour change varies across body regions, and how overall sexual dichromatism relat...

The pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis exhibits various forms of associative learning including (1) operant conditioning of aerial respiration where snails are trained not to open their pneumostome in a hypoxic pond water environment using a weak tactile stimulus to their pneumostome as they attempt to open it; and (2) a 24 h-lasting taste-specific learn...

The Garcia effect is a unique form of conditioned taste aversion which requires that a novel food stimulus be followed sometime later by a sickness state associated with the novel food stimulus. The long-lasting associative memory resulting from the Garcia effect ensures that organisms avoid toxic foods in their environment. Considering its ecologi...

Different populations of organisms occurring across varying thermal regimes show diversity in responses to heat stress. We use a “common garden experimental” approach designed to deal with phenotypic plasticity to study in Lymnaea stagnalis (Linnaeus, 1758) the behavioural and molecular responses to a heat shock in laboratory-inbred snails (W-strai...

Predator detection induces both behavioral and physiological responses in prey organisms. Our model organism, the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis, shows multiple defensive behaviors in response to predator cues. In this study, we investigated and compared the transcriptional effects induced by the exposure to a predator scent (i.e., crayfish effluent...

Food is not only necessary for our survival but also elicits pleasure. However, when a novel food is followed sometime later by nausea or sickness animals form a long-lasting association to avoid that food. This phenomenon is called the 'Garcia effect'. We hypothesized that lipopolysaccharide (LPS) could be used as the sickness-inducing stimulus to...

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in learning and memory formation by controlling the expression of genes through epigenetic processes. Although miRNAs unquestionably play a role in memory, past literature focusing on whether miRNAs play key roles in the consolidation of associative long-term memory in Lymnaea contained confounding variable...

Organisms evolve adaptive strategies to adjust to rapidly changing environmental stressors. Predation pressure is one of the strongest selective forces and organisms respond to predatory threats via innate and learned responses. We utilized a natural, experimental set-up, where two lakes Stoney and Margo in Canada containing natural populations of...

By employing a reductionistic (but not simplistic) approach using an established invertebrate model system, the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis, we investigated whether (1) lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced inflammation would cause a sickness state and impair cognitive function, and—if so—(2) would aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid—ASA) restore the impaire...

Increasing concentrations of fluoride in natural bodies of water due to anthropogenic activities can lead to potentially detrimental effects on residing species. Here we investigated the differences in fluoride exposure on feeding behaviour between freshly collected (i.e., wild) and lab-bred Lymnaea stagnalis and if developmental exposure plays a k...

Predation is a major force that shapes prey phenotypes, species interactions and ecological communities. Prey respond to variation in predation risk and intensity by either increasing or decreasing vigilance and balancing energy requirements under high- or low-risk scenarios. We test the possible mechanism of sensory adaptation and decision making...

Fluoride (F⁻), has been found to affect learning and memory in several species. In this study, we exposed an F⁻-naïve, inbred strain of Lymnaea stagnalis to a concentration of F⁻ similar to that naturally occurring in wild ponds. We found that the exposure to F⁻ before the configural learning procedure obstructs the memory formation and blocks the...

A major extrinsic factor influencing memory and neuro-cognitive performances across taxa is diet. Studies from vertebrates have shown the effects of a flavonoid rich diet on cognitive performance, but the mechanism underlying this action is still poorly understood. A common and abundant flavonoid present in numerous food substances is quercetin (Q)...

The mechanisms associated with neophobia, and anhedonia remain largely unknown. Neuropsychological disorders such as depression and schizophrenia are associated with excessive fear and anhedonia and have been linked to microRNA 137. We hypothesized that microRNAs (miRNAs) in the snail Lymnaea stagnalis are important for regulating feeding behaviour...

Fluoride occurs naturally in the terrestrial and aquatic environment and is a major component in tea. Prolonged fluoride exposure alters metabolic activity in several aquatic invertebrates. For the first time, we investigated the effects of fluoride on cognition in the pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis as it is capable of a higher form of associative le...

Changing environmental conditions often lead to microevolution of traits that are adaptive under the current selection pressure. Currently, one of the major selection pressures is the rise in temperatures globally that has a severe impact on the behavioral ecology of animals. However, the role of thermal stress on neuronal plasticity and memory for...

Taste aversion learning is universal. In animals, a single presentation of a novel food substance followed hours later by visceral illness causes animals to avoid that taste. This is known as bait-shyness or the Garcia effect. Humans demonstrate this by avoiding a certain food following the development of nausea after ingesting that food (‘Sauce Be...

Young adults entering college experience immense shifts in personal and professional environments. Such a potentially stressful event may trigger multiple psychological and physiological effects. In a repeated-measures longitudinal survey (N = 6 time-points) of first year cohort of residential undergraduate students in India, this study evaluates m...

A lab bred W-strain of Lymnaea stagnalis exhibits configural learning (CL). CL is a form of higher order associative learning wherein when snails experience two contrasting stimuli together such as predatory odour (CE: crayfish effluent) and food odour (C: carrot odour) they learn and associate risk with food. The memory for CL has been shown to la...

Animals respond to acute stressors by modifying their behaviour and physiology. The pond snail Lymnaea stagnalis exhibits configural learning (CL), a form of higher order associative learning. In CL snails develop a landscape of fear when they experience a predatory cue along with a taste of food. This experience results in a suppression of the foo...

There are reports on the inability of inbred, laboratory reared Lymnaea stagnalis to perform feeding and aerial respiration in the cold. It has also been suggested that laboratory-bred snails have an inability to perform aerial respiration in winter months in the laboratory. Here we used an inbred, laboratory-reared strain of Lymnaea (the S-strain)...

Stress plays an important role in memory formation in the great pond snail (Lymnaea stagnalis (Linnaeus, 1758)). Individual stressors have been shown to enhance or to perturb long-term memory (LTM) formation. However, when snails perceive a combination of two stressors, it is unclear the outcome with regards to LTM formation. Here we first show tha...

Young adults entering into college experience immense shifts in both personal and professional environments and this may result in some of them experiencing a lot of stress and difficulty in coping with their new surroundings. Such potentially stressful events may trigger multiple psychological as well as physiological effects. The current study in...

Enhanced cognitive ability is beneficial in unpredictable and harsh environments, as it enables animals to respond with flexibility. For animals living in urbanized areas, local environments not only are altered but can rapidly change during their lifetime. Urban residents are therefore challenged with identifying novel dangers and safe refuges in...

Animals engage in social interactions with changes in their behaviour and physiology. Environmental challenges, however, can influence social interactions by adding additional stressors. Here, we investigated the effects of urbanisation on the behaviour and hormonal responses of a tropical lizard species, Psammophilus dorsalis, during social intera...

Vertebrates lateralize many behaviours including social interactions. Social displays typically comprise multiple components, yet our understanding of how these are processed come from studies that typically examine responses to the dominant component or the complex signal as a whole. Here, we examine laterality in lizard responses to determine whe...

Dynamic physiological colour change allows animals to alter colours and patterns for communication, camouflage and thermoregulation. Using reflectance spectrometry and digital photography, we found that males of the Indian rock agama, Psammophilus dorsalis, can rapidly express intense colours that are different from the neutral state and specific t...

Escape strategies of animals are economic decisions, expected to vary as a function of both intrinsic (e.g., performance ability) and extrinsic factors (e.g., level of threat and microhabitat). Anthropogenic disturbance, especially urbanization, changes a range of environmental factors including habitat characteristics and predation risk. As a cons...

Rapid urbanization is a growing threat to biodiversity, causing wide-scale extirpation of species from their natural habitats. Some species such as rock agamas, Psammophilus dorsalis, seem to be sufficiently tolerant and continue to persist in urban environments. Given that urbanization alters species composition at multiple trophic levels, we expe...

Successful survival and reproduction of prey organisms depend on the ability to detect their potential predators accurately and respond effectively with suitable defenses. Predator detection can be innate or can be acquired through learning. We studied prey-predator interactions in the larval bronzed frogs (Sylvirana temporalis), which have the inn...