Hello and welcome!
I am an ecologist researching predator-prey interactions in natural populations. I am particularly interested in how animals manage risk and the consequences of their defense responses on mating patterns, evolutionary processes, and ecosystem dynamics. I employ field-based techniques, lab experiments and computer simulations to address these questions.
I am currently an Assistant Professor at GITAM, a private research University in Visakhapatnam. Previously I did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Theoretical Ecology and Evolution Lab, headed by Prof. Vishwesha Guttal at the Indian Institute of Science and before that I was a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Dror Hawlena at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I did my PhD with Prof. Rohini Balakrishnan at the Centre for Ecological Sciences in Indian Institute of Science.
Visit my research page to know more about my work and the publications page to read my papers. Feel free to contact me over email at viraj.torsekar [at] gmail.com, or Twitter @Torsay.
Recent news
- October 2024: Paper published in eLife! Here’s a short summary about our work. And here’s my twitter thread doing the same.
- July 2024: Joined the Department of Life Sciences of GITAM (Visakhapatnam campus) as an Assistant Professor.
- January 2024: Gave a talk each at the Gordon Research Seminar and Gordon Research Conference (Predator-prey interactions).
- September 2023: Paper accepted! Glad to have made it to the cover of Biology Letters!
- June 2023: Another new preprint! When it rains, it pours (manuscripts!). Using, field litter decomposition experiments, we investigated whether higher tolerance of macro-decomposers to aridity may counterbalance the effect of smaller decomposers, leading to similar decomposition rates across climatic gradients. Check it here.
- May 2023: New preprint! In this follow-up study to the size assortative mating and predation risk paper, we examined whether larger prey individuals with superior competitive abilities prefer safer breeding sites and that smaller conspecifics prefer riskier ones in the absence of direct competition, implying prudent burrow site selection. Check out what we found here.
- April 2023: New preprint! This pandemic-era paper was in collaboration with my PhD lab. We tested how is more than one reproductive tactic maintained in a population, under differing ecological conditions. Check it out here.
- December 2022: Our paper in Ecology is now the cover article for February 2023! The selected beautiful macro photograph of two fighting male isopods was clicked by Dror Hawlena.
- August 2022: Just after the ESEB conference, while still in central Europe, took the opportunity to travel to University of Konstanz and give an invited talk to the Department for the Ecology of Animal Societies
- August 2022: Attended ESEB 2022 and presented our work on assortative mating and prudent habitat choice in isopods
- July 2022: New paper out! Our work on predation risk and assortative mating in desert isopods and scorpions got accepted for publication in Ecology!