Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Foraging actively can be advantageous in heterogeneous environments
Published: 2024-11-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
A wealth of evidence indicates that the existence of active foragers and sit-and-wait foragers is widespread in nature. While active foragers visit foraging sites and leave them randomly, sit-and-wait foragers only do so if the benefit of leaving exceeds the cost. This dichotomy has been documented in the larval and adult stages of Drosophila melanogaster. For instance, when exposed to a [...]
Towards a unified ontology for monitoring ecosystem services
Published: 2024-11-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
The concept of ecosystem services (ES) has greatly evolved since it was first proposed and, as it gained popularity, has been used in diverse applications. Today, ES are an important part of global and national environmental policies. In this context, there is a call for the monitoring of ES to support their management. The proliferation of terms used with the concept of ES may be a barrier to [...]
Border biosecurity interceptions for air passengers – assessing intervention methods and analytic tools
Published: 2024-11-14
Subjects: Agriculture, Biosecurity, Life Sciences
At-border interventions are a critical step along the biosecurity continuum, to measure and control the risks associated with the cross-border movement of people and goods. Air passengers are a high-volume pathway for a range of biosecurity risk materials, against which various interventions may be used (e.g., manual searches, detector dogs, x-rays, etc.). Using a large interception database for [...]
Gut microbiome composition and function – including transposase gene abundance - varies with age, but not senescence, in a wild vertebrate
Published: 2024-11-14
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Ornithology
Studies on wild animals, mostly undertaken using 16S metabarcoding, have yielded ambigous evidence regarding changes in the gut microbiome (GM) with age and senescence. Furthermore, variation in GM function has rarely been studied in such wild populations, despite GM metabolic characteristics potentially being associated with host senescent declines. Here, we used seven years of longitudinal [...]
Advancing the spatiotemporal dimension of wildlife–pollution interactions
Published: 2024-11-14
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Toxicology, Zoology
Chemical pollution is a pervasive problem and is now considered the fastest-growing agent of global environmental change. Numerous pollutants are known to disrupt animal behaviour, alter ecological interactions, and shift evolutionary trajectories. Crucially, both chemical pollutants and individual organisms are non-randomly distributed throughout the environment. Despite this, the current [...]
Choosing friends in an uncertain world: information reduces relationship stability in a Bayesian learning model of cooperative partnership
Published: 2024-11-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Social animals often form differentiated social relationships with conspecifics. Developing closer partnerships with some than others can facilitate cooperative interactions in which individuals share resources or risk. When choosing a partner, individuals face a decision: a known partner might be sub-optimal if better options are available, but switching partners can be risky if others' [...]
Pollinator ethanology: A comment on Bowland et al.
Published: 2024-11-13
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Nutrition, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Toxicology, Zoology
An integrated approach to above- and below-ground ecological monitoring for nature-based solutions
Published: 2024-11-12
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. As the development of nature-based solutions (NbS) increases globally, it is important to ensure that projects meet the objective of benefiting biodiversity, alongside tackling societal challenges. However, most NbS projects do not directly monitor ecological outcomes, and those that do often focus on a limited set of metrics. It is therefore challenging to assess whether projects fulfil the [...]
Charting uneven progress of sustainability: A multi-dimensional assessment of the SDGs in Northeast India
Published: 2024-11-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are used to assess progress in the fields of the environment, economy, and society. Although assessments conducted at national and international levels are popular, subnational research, especially on India, is less common. Using 84 accessible indicators (2021–2022), a comprehensive study of 15 SDGs was conducted across 103 districts in eight states in the [...]
Probable physical factors of anthropogenesis
Published: 2024-11-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
The increasing frequency of climate catastrophes worldwide against background of global warming and reduction of biodiversity in human ecosystem are typical signs of global extinction, the sixth in ~600 million years of Phanerozoic. The regularity of global extinctions of marine biota with a period of ~62 Myr in Phanerozoic correlates with cyclicity of tidal effects of stellar environment of [...]
Harbingers of change: towards a mechanistic understanding of anticipatory plasticity
Published: 2024-11-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Phenotypic plasticity is a central avenue through which organisms cope with environmental heterogeneity by responding to cues of current environmental change to maximize fitness. If environmental change is impending and cues can reliably predict future conditions, organisms can also mount adaptive responses in anticipation of these changes if they possess the mechanistic architecture to do so [...]
Conformal Prediction quantifies the uncertainty of Species Distribution Models
Published: 2024-11-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Providing accurate estimates of uncertainty is key for the analysis, adoption, and interpretation of species distribution models. In this manuscript, through the analysis of data from an emblematic North American cryptid, I illustrate how Conformal Prediction allows fast and informative uncertainty quantification. I discuss how the conformal predictions can be used to gain more knowledge about [...]
Behavioral flexibility is related to exploration and persistence, but not boldness or motor diversity
Published: 2024-11-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences
Behavioral flexibility, the ability to change behavior when circumstances change based on learning from previous experience, is thought to play an important role in a species' ability to successfully adapt to new environments and expand its geographic range. However, behavioral flexibility is rarely directly tested at the individual level. This limits our ability to determine how it relates to [...]
Evolutionarily Optimal Phage Life-History Traits
Published: 2024-11-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Population Biology
Optimal phage life-history traits are computed from data on phenotypic tradeoffs presented in De Paepe and Tadei (2006). A parameter is introduced, l_e, that describes the loss of virions in the environment. Hygienic interventions increase l_e. The optimal burst size decreases with l_e and the optimal capsid thickness increases with l_e. The optimal viral fitness also decreases with l_e. An [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Tropical Southwestern Atlantic
Published: 2024-11-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The “Mangroves of the Tropical Southwestern Atlantic” (TSA) is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Eastern Brazil, Northeastern Brazil, including the Fernando de Noronha Archipelago and Rocas Atoll. The TSA mangroves had a mapped extent of 1719.7 km2 in 2020, representing 1.2% of the global mangrove area. The [...]