Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Beyond where species go: integrating SDMs, functional traits, and the Tree of Life to anticipate climate‑driven change in ecosystem functioning
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Forecasting biodiversity under climate-change scenarios typically involves applying species distribution models (SDMs) to project shifts in the areas where abiotic conditions are suitable for a given species under future climates, often interpreted as gains or losses in species ranges. Although the impacts of species loss are often quantified using measures of functional or evolutionary [...]
Methodological challenges in avian nestbox temperature manipulation experiments: a review with recommendations
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Experimental manipulation of nest temperature - particularly in nest boxes, given ease of access and control - has become increasingly used for understanding the ecological impacts of climate change on wild birds. While field experiments are crucial for establishing causal links between temperature variation and biological responses, they present numerous logistical challenges. Moreover, [...]
The promise and challenge of environmental epigenomics in a rapidly changing world
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Environmental Studies, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
There has been a fast-paced research effort on the role of epigenetic mechanisms in facilitating organisms’ capacity to cope with rapid environmental change, highlighted by several recent reviews and special issues on this topic. What is important, along with this momentum, is to pause and reflect on both the promises and challenges of linking detailed molecular mechanisms to broad patterns of [...]
Reliable inference: benefits of open raw data may be universal in meta-analysis
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
While the benefits of open data are often discussed, they are rarely quantified. Here, we provide the first evidence of the potential gains from using raw data for evidence synthesis and introduce a tool that helps researchers determine when this approach is most beneficial. Classical meta-analysis (CMA) relies on published results, making it vulnerable to publication bias and p-hacking. We [...]
TOCing with birds: Touchscreen-equipped operant chambers as flexible tools for avian behavioral experiments
Published: 2026-04-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Understanding how animals respond to visual stimuli is a key goal of behavioral and evolutionary ecology. Experiments documenting the behavioral responses of receivers to different stimuli are an essential explanatory tool, yet presenting stimuli that engage in complex but controlled animal behaviors – such as naturalistic movement – to biologically relevant receivers remains a significant [...]
Plastic shifts in thermal preference and thermoregulation strategy across ontogeny in an invasive fly
Published: 2026-04-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Zoology
Behavioural thermoregulation allows ectotherms to escape extreme or seek optimal temperatures. Its precision can impact survival and fitness under changing conditions and its plasticity can be an adaptive strategy when the plasticity of thermal limits is insufficient to buffer against warming. We explore the developmental and intergenerational plasticity of behavioural thermoregulation strategies [...]
Rethinking terrestrial wildlife telemetry through instrumentation without capture and handling
Published: 2026-04-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Telemetry using animal‑borne biologgers is central to wildlife research. Capturing and instrumenting wild animals, however, remains the most invasive, logistically challenging, and costly component of telemetry studies. This has contributed to current practice, which favors long tracking durations on few individuals, prioritizing longevity over temporal detail. While this model has yielded [...]
Autonomous biodiversity credits on the horizon?
Published: 2026-04-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Biodiversity credits are being pushed as a means to fund nature conservation. Much of the debate around credits has concerned additionality, leakage, and permanence, and the extent to which biodiversity can be captured in an individual unit. As AI models continue to develop, however, technology could create a new kind of loss-of-control problem for biodiversity credits. In this Perspective, we [...]
Sociality beyond helpers at the nest: the number of strong associations predict reproductive trade-offs in a cooperative breeder
Published: 2026-04-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Individual social relationships can shape fitness across taxa, but in studies on cooperatively breeding species, the social environment relevant to reproduction is typically reduced to the number of helpers. We tested whether breeder sociality beyond helper number predicts reproductive performance in a colonial cooperative bird, the sociable weaver (Philetairus socius). Using long-term data and [...]
Ecosystem condition assessments: A context-specific workflow to integrate local expert knowledge and remote sensing
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite decades of conservation science, we still struggle with a deceptively simple question: how do we know if an ecosystem is in good or poor condition? We present a reproducible, six-step workflow for assessing ecosystem condition using remote sensing, ecological knowledge, and expert validation. The approach is designed to be applied consistently across diverse biomes, while remaining [...]
Evolutionary arms race between transposable elements and human genes: telomere-to-telomere genome comprehensive analysis identifies young L1 clusters in the interferon-alpha domain
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Transposable elements (TEs) have played a central role in major evolutionary transitions across the human lineage, from eukaryogenesis to the emergence of the eutherian placenta, and are currently reactivated in cancer and autoimmune diseases. The availability of the complete telomere-to-telomere (T2T) human genome assembly enables comprehensive investigation of TE contributions to gene [...]
Resource abundance can buffer trophic mismatch in a caterpillar-passerine food-chain
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Phenological mismatch occurs where variation in the magnitude of the response to environmental cues among species disrupts previously synchronised interspecific interactions, posing a risk to ecosystems as the climate changes. Understanding how ecological and environmental factors modulate the fitness effects of mismatch is essential for forecasting its impacts. Here, we analyse trophic mismatch [...]
Aliens Are Likely to Be Smart But Not “Intelligent”: What Evolution of Cognition on Earth Tells Us about Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Published: 2026-04-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
How likely is it that we will find aliens like the ones in so many science fiction stories–people who possess self-awareness and cognitive ability comparable to ours, but who arose from an independent evolutionary origin? Here I make the argument that if life has evolved on other planets, it may well eventually acquire complexity equivalent to that found on Earth. The resulting lifeforms may be [...]
Human Homosexuality, Transsexuality and Evolution: A Critical Appraisal
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Homosexual behavior occurs naturally in many species of mammals. Among primates, homosexuality is an evolutionary innovation originating when the anthropoid lineage split from the prosimian linage, becoming prominent in socially complex old world primates. Many species possess multiple genders: multiple morphs within each sex. Homosexual behavior and transgender expression occur across all [...]
Amphibian communities are structured by local habitat quality in garden ponds and spatial factors in urban ponds
Published: 2026-04-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Amphibians are among the most threatened vertebrates, and urbanisation contributes to their decline through habitat loss, fragmentation, pollution, and the spread of invasive species. At the same time, urban freshwater habitats, such as ponds, can serve as important refuges within highly modified landscapes. While the role of urban ponds in supporting freshwater biodiversity is increasingly [...]