Home Biodiversity DIVISION

Thrust Areas of Research:

Development of Indian finfish and shellfish biodiversity knowledge base to foster the assessment of biological diversity of Indian seas.
Biodiversity valuation of marine organisms in selected marine ecosystems along the Indian coast.
Assessment of fishing impacts on biodiversity loss with reference to threatened species and fisheries management.
Monitoring the conservation biology of economically important and threat-prone species and fragile ecosystem.
Development and Maintenance of database of Maine Biodiversity Museum to dissiminate the information on the web to make it easily accessible to all

Ongoing Research Projects:

a. In-house projects :

Completed Research Projects:

a. In-house projects :

Significant Achievements in the last 5 years

Technologies/Concepts/Findings

• Technologies developed for the propagation of Sinularia kavarattiensis in the laboratory and in open sea
• Technologies developed for the propagation of soft corals – Cladiella laciniosa, Dampia pocilloporaeformis and Lobophytum pauciflorum in the laboratory
• Technologies for the propogation of sponges and  hard coral were developed
• Deep-sea sponge species new to science (Semperellame galoxea sp. nov.) reported from  Andaman waters : Registered in World Porifera Database (WPD) and World Register of Marine Species (WORMS)
• Four species of corals, Acropora thomasi, A. valamunensis, A. mannarensis and A. josephi  new to science described.
• Bleekeria murtii –  A fish species new to science described
• A unique bacterial strain C29 isolated from Porites sp. from Vizhinjam was subjected to 16S rRNA gene sequencing and blast search. This strain was found to be a potential novel genus showing  similarity to Fabibacter halotolerans under the family Flexibacteraceae
• Herbarium of 85 species of seaweeds from GOMBR was developed
• New distributional records reported from Indian seas: