behavioral ecology

Animal behavior sits at the intersection of ecology, evolution, and cognition — shaping how individuals interact with their environments and with each other, and scaling up into population and community-level patterns. The Swain Lab has worked on a wide range of behavioral questions, from collective decision-making in fish schools to task allocation in ant colonies to mate choice in sea turtles to host-parasite dynamics in coastal fish communities. A common thread across these projects is the use of quantitative approaches — network analysis, game theory, field experiments, and ecological modeling — to understand how individual behavior produces emergent ecological outcomes, and how those outcomes feed back into evolutionary dynamics.

Published work on collective behavior has shown that group size shapes foraging decisions in fish in ways consistent with Minority Game theory — connecting behavioral ecology to models from complexity science and economics. Work on ant colonies has used interaction networks to reveal how information flow and social structure coordinate task allocation at the colony level, offering a window into the evolution of division of labor in social insects. On the ecological side, the lab has examined host-parasite dynamics in fish communities along the east coast of India, finding that parasitic isopods show strong niche partitioning and host specialization across ecosystems — patterns that connect individual host-choice behavior to community-level ecological structure. Work on Olive Ridley sea turtles has examined mate size preference at a major arribada rookery, asking how sexual selection operates in one of the largest aggregating marine vertebrates on Earth. Work on large carnivore movement has shown that wild canids and felids differ systematically in their reliance on travel routeways, revealing how species-specific behavioral tendencies shape landscape use and space-sharing. 

Relevant papers:

1. Fagan, W. F., et al (2025). Wild canids and felids differ in their reliance on travel routeways. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 122(40), e2401042122.

2. Swain, A., Williams, S., Di Felice, L. J., & Hobson, E. A. (2022). Interactions and information: Exploring task allocation in ant colonies using network analysis. Animal Behaviour, 189, 69–81.

3. Swain, A., & Fagan, W. F. (2019). Group size and decision-making: Experimental evidence for Minority Games in fish behavior. Animal Behaviour, 155, 9–19.

4. Swain, A., Hoffman, T., Leyba, K., & Fagan, W. F. (2021). Exploring the evolution of perception: An agent-based approach. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 9, 457.

5. Das, A. K., Mohapatra, S. K., Tripathy, B., Swain, A., & Mohapatra, A. (2025). Do Olive Ridley turtles select mates based on size? An investigation of mate size preference at major arribada rookery. Ecosphere, 6(4), e70264.

6. Mohapatra, S. K., Swain, A., Ray, D., Behera, R. K., Acharya, B., Seth, J. K., & Mohapatra, A. (2024). Niche partitioning and host specialisation in fish-parasitizing isopods: Trait-dependent patterns from three ecosystems on the east coast of India. Ecology and Evolution, 14(9), e70298.

7. Mohapatra, S. K., Swain, A., Roy, S., Tripathy, B., Mohapatra, A., & Seth, J. K. (2024). Low diversity, high dominance, and high host prevalence of parasitic isopods of the family Cymothoidae in Chilika lagoon, India. Parasitology Research, 123(4), 1–6.