PROCEEDINGS OF THE 107TH INDIAN SCIENCE CONGRESS BANGALORE, 2020 PART II SECTION OF ANIMAL, VETERINARY AND FISHERY SCIENCES PRESIDENT: PROF. PRAKASH CHANDRA JOSHI CONTENTS I. Presidential Address 5 II. Abstracts of Platinum Jubilee Lecture / Award Lectures 31 III. Abstracts of Symposium / Invited Lectures 37 IV. Abstracts of Oral / Poster Presentations 99 V. List of Past Sectional Presidents 515 107TH INDIAN SCIENCE CONGRESS JANUARY, 3-7, 2020 BANGALORE I PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS PRESIDENT: PROF. PRAKASH CHANDRA JOSHI (4) Section II : Animal, Veterinary and Fishery Sciences PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS SUSTAINING RURAL LIVELIHOOD: AN ENTOMOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO CHANGING CLIMATIC CONDITIONS IN HIGH ALTITUDE AREAS Prakash Chandra Joshi President, Animal, Veterinary and Fisheries Sciences, 107th ISC Dept. Of Zoology and Environmental Science Gurukula Kangri Vishwavidyalaya, Haridwar-249404 Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT Ever since there origin some four hundred million years ago in the Devonian period in Paleozoic era, the insects have continued to be the largest class of animals, comprising over 60% of described taxa in the animal kingdom. At the species level, there is no doubt that insects make up the most of the world’s biodiversity of all the 1.7 million species described. Insects are the most numerous, most diverse and ecologically most important terrestrial animals. Numbering over 1,000,000 species, insects were the first organisms to successfully colonise land. They have concurred almost all habitats. The role allotted to all these tiny creatures in the grand scheme of nature is to eat and be eaten. People in high altitude regions already live in a fragile landscape. Their marginalization makes them even more sensitive to environmental degradation. Practices in farming and grazing that enabled people to thrive in the past may not continue to be effective as ecosystems degrade, population dynamics shift and a rapidly changing world puts pressure on communities. Insects are an inseparable part of the ecosystem and influence the process of the ecology and environment directly and indirectly in various ways. Bees and other associated insect involved in various ecological services are one of the most efficient biodiversity indicators in the planet earth. The presence of bees and butterflies directly indicates the source of flowering resources nearby of their flight range. Mother Nature has very kind for developing an inseparable symbiotic interaction between plants and insects in numerous forms of interactions. (5) 107th Indian Science Congress, Bangalore 2020 : Presidential Address 107th Indian Science Congress, Bangalore 2020 : Presidential Address Insects are the key components of essentially every terrestrial food web. Herbivorous insects, which make up the majority, eat plants, using the chemical energy plants derive from sunlight to synthesize animal tissues and organs. The job is a big one, and is split into many different callings. Caterpillars and grasshoppers chew plant leaves, aphids and planthoppers suck their juices, bees steal their pollen and drink their nectar, while beetles and flies eat their fruits and devastate their roots. Even the wood of huge trees is eaten by wood-boring insect larvae. In turn, these plant-eating insects are themselves eaten, being captured, killed or parasitized by yet more insects. All of these are, in their turn, consumed by still larger creatures. Even when plants die and are turned to mush by fungi and bacteria, there are insects that specialize in eating them. Going up the food chain, each animal is less and less fussy about what kind of food it will eat. While a typical herbivorous insect might consume only one species of plant, insectivorous animals (mostly arthropods, but also many birds and mammals) don’t much care about what kind of insect they catch. This is why there are so many more kinds of insects than birds or mammals. Insects play many important roles, not only in maintaining the various natural phenomenon but also in sustaining the lively hood of a large population particularly of those living in rural parts of the country. The important roles they play include insects as food, as decomposers, pollinators, seed dispersals, nutrient cycling, vectors, indicators of pollution and climate change. Then they also provide us honey, silk, lac and a number of products with different uses. A number of insects do have medicinal values e. g Ayurveda practitioners apply a compound of termite sand and mustard oil around patients’ thighs, suffering from arthritis, leaving the mixture in place for approximately 25 minutes or until a burning sensation develops. Treatments continue for 25 minutes each day until patients experience relief. Maggot therapy is used with patients whose wounds failed to respond to antibiotics, the use of bee products for medicinal purposes stands out as one of the few “alternative” medicines that have its own technical term—”apitherapy,”. Similarly, there are many more reports, where insects or their products are being used as medicines. However, in recent years our planet earth has experienced a process of climate change i.e. the phenomenon of altered rainfall, temperature, humidity variations, prolongation or shorting of seasons, these all have not only impacted the global faunal as well as floral diversity in general but to the diversity of insects in particular, which largely require a particular temperature. Humidity and food resources for laying their eggs and developing the young ones. (6) Section II : Animal, Veterinary and Fishery Sciences INTRODUCTION Rural communities typically depend on the continued maintenance of natural resources for their day-to-day survival. A good land base, fertile soils, regular water supply, and protection against climatic extremes all enable human consumption, production and settlement to take place. All types of natural systems yield resources that are used directly to generate income and subsistence, sometimes as a community’s sole livelihood source and often in combination with other production systems. These natural resources tend to be particularly important for poorer households and at times of stress, and often provide the ultimate safety-net when other sources of subsistence and income fail. Community livelihood activities however sometimes contribute to the degradation of the very natural systems they depend on. Almost all forms of human production and consumption have the potential to deplete, convert, pollute or otherwise degrade natural systems. Activities such as overgrazing, over-fishing, conversion of forest and wetlands to agriculture and unsustainable wildlife utilization all degrade and deplete natural systems directly. As natural systems become degraded, livelihoods are progressively weakened and the economic welfare of communities suffers. Conversely, nature conservation can provide a means of sustaining and strengthening community livelihoods. Recognizing that local economies depend intimately on the availability and quality of natural resources, conservation has become an increasingly important component of rural development activities. Simultaneously there has been a growing recognition that local economic concerns play a central role in natural resource management, and most strategies for nature conservation now involve and benefit local communities in some way. Both development and conservation efforts aim to make it economically desirable for local communities to maintain the status and integrity of nature (Lucy Emerton, http://economics.iucn.org). Insects are the most dominant group of animals, not only throughout the globe (10, 53, 578 species) and Indian diversity (65,047 species) but in the Indian Himalayan region, they have been identified in equally good numbers. This includes about 24,784 species under 26 orders, which makes 38.1% of the total known diversity of India. They can be seen in poles, deserts, caves, rivers estuaries, etc. They far surpass all other terrestrial animals in number and practically occur everywhere. Insects represent a dominant component of (7) 107th Indian Science Congress, Bangalore 2020 : Presidential Address biodiversity in most terrestrial ecosystems yet they have largely been neglected in studies on the role of biodiversity in nutrient cycling, pollination and in decomposition or more generally the functioning of the ecosystem. Insects have lived on earth for more than 350 million years- compared with less than 2 million for men. During this time they have evolved in many directions to become adapted to life in almost every type of habitat and have developed many unusual, picturesque, and even amazing features. Man benefits from insects in many ways; without them, human society could not exist in the present form. When naming the most important organisms in any terrestrial ecosystem, insects are often forgotten. They do however play a central role in plant reproduction, soil fertility, sustained forest health and diversity. If one compares the importance of various groups of organisms from the point of view of the biomass or diversity of species, then the dominance of trees in relation to the biomass is clear but on the other hand, the dominance of insects is also clear in terms of the biodiversity. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) classified ecosystem services into four categories: provisioning services such as food and fresh water; regulating services such as flood and disease control; cultural services such as spiritual,