I work in the field of malacology with special focus on the study of the diversity, systematics and evolution of marine heterobranchs. I use integrative taxonomy approach with scanning electron microscopic images of anatomical characters and DNA to infer diversity and phylogeny of marine heterobranchs.

https://www.uib.no/en/rg/mollusca

BIO 232 Systematics and Evolution of Marine Invertebrates (Teaching assistant)

See a complete overview of publications in Cristin.

Bharate, M., Padula, V., Apte, D., & Shimpi, G. G. (2020). Integrative description of two new Cratena species (Mollusca: Nudibranchia) from western India. Zootaxa 4729(3), 359–370.

Bharate, M., Apte D., & Malaquias MAE. (2020). A massive aggregation of the mangrove snail Bakawan rotundata (A. Adams, 1850) (Cephalaspedia: Haminoeidae) in India. Regional studies in Marine Science 39, 101406

Bharate, M., Oskars, T. R., Narayana, S., Ravinesh, R., Kumar A. B., & Malaquias M. A. E. (2018). Description of a new species of Haminoea (Gastropoda: Cephalaspidea) from India, with an account of the diversity of the genus in the Indo-West Pacific. Journal of Natural History 52(37–38), 2437–2456.

Bharate, M., Oskars, T., Apte, D & Malaquias MAE. (2018). Diniatys callosa (Preston, 1908), new combination name for Haminoea callosa from the Andaman Islands (India). Journal of Conchology 43(1),1–3.

PhD Project - Systematics and evolution of the rock-dweller genus Smaragdinella (Mollusca:Gastropoda) in the Indo-West Pacific

Continental-drift and climatic shifts during the Cenozoic (last 65 million years) have shaped life on Earth leading to the extinction and diversification of new biotas and to significant geographical range expansions and contractions of species. Understanding how these processes operated can shed light on the time, geography and mode of speciation of current faunas and floras, helping thus predicting the impact of current global warming events to biodiversity. Smaragdinella is the only radiation among the entire and diverse marine gastropod family Haminoeidae to dwell on rocky-shores. This makes Smaragdinella snails of special evolutionary interest, but the processes that have driven the diversification and adaptation of these snails to a unique ecology remain to be understood.

We want to answer the following questions: How many species and what are their phylogenetic relationships and distributions? How did major historical tectonic and climatic events impact the diversification of Smaragdinella? How did vicariance, dispersal, and ecology contribute to patterns of regional diversity and the geography of speciation? Could diet specialization be the driver behind the unique adaptation of Smaragdinella to rocky-shores? The project will use a combination of fossils, molecular phylogenetics and morphology to the address the diversity and evolution of Smaragdinella and scanning electron microscopy and metabarcoding DNA sequencing techniques to study gut contents and the diet of species.