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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences

The Marsupial Database: A comprehensive dataset on the ecology and life history of American and Australasian marsupials

Mariana Silva Ferreira, Rodrigo C Rossi, Stephane Batista, et al.

Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Marsupials are an important but typically neglected group of mammals that have been overlooked in many comparative analyses of vertebrate ecology and life-history evolution. In order to address this knowledge bias, we have developed The Marsupial Database. The Marsupial Database contains traits for a phylogenetically diverse set of 414 extant and recently extinct (last 200 years) species from all [...]

Physical and Migration Metrics of White Storks (Ciconia ciconia) and the influence that landfills play in their variation

Andrew Christopher Slater

Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Zoology

1. White storks (Ciconia Ciconia) are a traditionally fully migratory species and their numbers in western Europe were decimated in the last century. Their numbers have since boomed and they have altered their migratory strategy to have become a partially migratory species. This change has been ascribed in large part to anthropogenic food subsidies, particularly in the form of landfill sites. 2. [...]

Cover crops influence aboveground and belowground invertebrates in farmlands

Paula Thitz, Mikko Tiusanen, Seraina Lisa Cappelli, et al.

Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Life Sciences

1. Maintaining vegetation diversity through cover crops could counteract the decreasing soil carbon and biodiversity in intensive monoculture farming, but its impacts on fauna have rarely been quantified. 2. To investigate how cover crops influence the abundance and trophic structure of invertebrates, or inorganic N (proxy of soil functioning), barley (Hordeum vulgare) was grown with up to eight [...]

The number of strong social bonds is linked to survival in a cooperative bird

Gabriel Munar-Delgado, Matthieu Paquet, Babette Fourie, et al.

Published: 2025-07-24
Subjects: Life Sciences

Recent evidence from large mammals, including humans, shows that the quality of social associations beyond general group size can positively influence health and survival. However, whether individuals in other taxa consistently differ in sociality in ways that affect fitness and thus provide a basis for selection remains largely unexplored. In this study, we examined how individual sociality [...]

Long-term change in precipitation and its variability and consequences in a montane environment

David W. Inouye, billy barr, Rebecca M. Prather

Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

The climate at high altitudes is changing more rapidly than in many other areas, with a variety of consequences for montane flora and fauna. We analyze long-term weather records from Crested Butte (2703m, 1910- 2024) and Gothic (2921m, 1974 – 2024), Colorado, USA, in the West Elk Mountains. In Crested Butte, mean monthly precipitation in the growing season (May – September) can vary by over [...]

FIRST RECORD OF THE SOUTH EUROPEAN ROACH, SarmaRutilus rubilio (Bonaparte, 1837) IN THE ASINARO RIVER BASIN (SICILY, ITALY).

ANTONINO DUCHI

Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Life Sciences

The first record of the South European Roach Sarmarutilus rubilio (Bonaparte, 1837) introduced to the Asinaro river basin (SE Sicily) is reported. The species, alien to Sicily, was sampled/observed in May-June 2025 almost along the entire main river, from near the headwaters up to about 3 km from the mouth. The SE Roach is able to reproduce in this environment, as evidenced by the presence of [...]

The Minimum Carbon Theory: A Physiological Basis for Species Coexistence

Lei Chen

Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Understanding how species coexist and why diversity varies across regions remains a central challenge in ecology. Although widely used theories such as niche theory, neutral theory, and modern coexistence theory have yielded key insights into coexistence and diversity, their reliance on abstract parameters lacking direct physiological grounding limits empirical validation and constrains [...]

Big bills, small changes: with few exceptions, Jungle crows show minor variation in bill morphology across their distribution

Aubrey Lynn Alamshah, Benjamin Michael Marshall

Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Examinations of morphology can reveal a species' relationship with the environment and their evolutionary trajectory. Particularly pronounced difference can hint at specific selection pressures, and reveal hitherto unknown species. Cryptic species, with only subtle morphological differences, are widespread and ignoring them risks underestimating biodiversity and their threatened status. Recently [...]

Marine heatwave and keystone predator loss drive broad-scale decline and hinder recovery of a rocky intertidal kelp

Francis David Gerraty, Karah N Cox-Ammann, Melissa A Douglas, et al.

Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology

Human activities are increasingly driving the co-occurrence of multiple ecological stressors, resulting in interactive and cumulative impacts that can reshape ecosystem dynamics and accelerate population declines of climate-sensitive species. Here, we use over two decades of rocky intertidal monitoring across 17 sites spanning over 1,200 km of coastline to assess how two unprecedented stressors—a [...]

Genetic evidence for the rediscovery in the wild of the critically endangered Sahara killifish Apricaphanius saourensis (Cyprinodontiformes: Aphaniidae)

Louiza Derouiche, Redouane Tahri, Carlos Rodríguez Fernandes

Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Zoology

Apricaphanius saourensis was described in 2006 from the Saoura River in western Algeria, and is currently listed as possibly extinct in the wild. We recently discovered an aphaniid population in a very isolated secondary wadi of the Guir River about 115 Km northwest of A. saourensis’ type locality, which we hypothesized could belong to A. saourensis based on images taken from living individuals. [...]

The hidden dimensions of biodiversity

Sami Domisch, Sibylle Schroer, Sophia Kimmig, et al.

Published: 2025-07-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Uncovering and describing biodiversity is fundamental to advancing both scientific understanding and public awareness of nature. While many biodiversity facets are visible and even in the spotlight, including those biodiversity features we encounter on a daily basis, much of the world’s biodiversity remains hidden. This review addresses the critical questions: What dimensions constitute hidden [...]

Reevaluating Global Whale Strandings: A Review of Trypanosomiasis as a Potential Cause

SEYUP LEE

Published: 2025-07-18
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences

Whale mass strandings are enigmatic events with multifactorial causes. Conventional hypotheses include anthropogenic sonar exposure, navigational errors, and infectious diseases, yet many stranding events remain unexplained¹. Here we propose African trypanosomiasis (“sleeping sickness”) as an overlooked contributing factor. This perspective synthesizes evidence that Trypanosoma parasites, [...]

Substitution Models in Phylogenetic Reconstruction from Molecular Data: Theoretical Principles, Implementation and Selection Methodologies, Limits of Results Interpretation, and Recent Advances

Richard Murdoch Montgomery

Published: 2025-07-18
Subjects: Life Sciences

Substitution models constitute the mathematical foundation of modern phylogenetic inference, providing the probabilistic framework necessary for reconstructing evolutionary relationships from molecular sequence data. These models describe the stochastic processes governing nucleotide or amino acid changes over evolutionary time through continuous-time Markov chains, enabling maximum likelihood [...]

Habitat availability, Jurassic and Cretaceous origins of the deep-bodied shark morphotype, and the rise of pelagic sharks

Joel Harrison Gayford, Patrick L Jambura, Julia Türtscher, et al.

Published: 2025-07-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

Macroevolutionary trends in morphology fundamentally shape our understanding of marine ecosystems through deep time. Sharks (Elasmobranchii: Selachii) have been suggested to broadly exhibit two discrete body forms: one ‘shallow-bodied’ form associated with slow-moving benthic species, and a ‘deep-bodied’ form typified by highly active pelagic taxa. Until now, the validity or evolution of these [...]

Geography of masting synchrony creates more famines than feasts

Jakub Szymkowiak, Jessie Foest, Marcin Dyderski, et al.

Published: 2025-07-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Interannually highly variable and synchronized production of large seed crops by perennial plants, called masting, drives resource pulses and famines with cascading effects on food webs. While the spatial scale of masting synchrony is well documented, it remains unclear how synchrony differs between years of seed abundance and failure, and how such dynamics extend across species and space. These [...]

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