Anusha Shankar
TIFR, Hyderabad
Anusha Shankar is a Reader/Assistant Professor at TIFR, Hyderabad. She joined in October 2023, and her lab is starting to study the ecology and physiology of birds in Telangana and Arunachal Pradesh. For the past 12 years, she has been studying hummingbirds’ energy management strategies in the face of environmental variation. She is especially fascinated by their ability to use a hibernation-like state called torpor to save energy at night. In her latest project, she has been investigating gene expression across metabolic states in hummingbirds: how can they get cold (50°F/10°C) sometimes every night, and rewarm safely every morning, without damaging organs like their hearts and brains? Anusha is also a National Geographic Explorer and Young Leader, a Ramalingaswami Fellow, and a Leading Edge Fellow, and loves mentoring students. She was selected Associate of IASc in 2024.
Session 2C: Lectures by Fellows/Associates
Chairperson: Rajesh K Srivastava, BHU, Varanasi
Budgeting Heat and Energy: How Do Birds Do It?
Animals face various environmental challenges on a daily basis while foraging for food, managing their thermal needs, and finding safe places to sleep and rear their young. I am especially interested in how they manage their daily energy needs, given these survival and environmental challenges. One way to study this is to measure how animals allocate their daily energy budgets across various activities, such as in different land use types. One potential component of this daily energy budget is the ability to modulate their thermoregulatory costs by using heterothermy, where animals lower their body temperatures to save energy. Hibernation is a form of heterothermy. Birds like hummingbirds can use a daily version of this, called daily torpor, dropping their body temperature by up to 38°C (down to 3°C). I have been studying this adaptation in hummingbirds, integrating ecological data, whole animal energetics, gene expression, and mitochondrial parameters to understand heterothermy across biological scales. I am studying comparative avian heterothermy, by collecting data from the Indian tropics while training local biologists. I plan to continue to integrate ecology, physiology, evolutionary perspectives, and molecular and imaging techniques to understand how heterothermic animals exist.