Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Ecosystem-based harvest strategies in regional fisheries management
Published: 2026-10-16
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Life Sciences
Fisheries have complex effects on the dynamics and structure of marine ecosystems. Single-stock management in isolation can cause ecosystems to deviate from desired states and fail to achieve both single-stock and ecosystem-wide objectives. This can be addressed through ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM), including ecosystem harvest strategies. We benchmarked the state of development of [...]
The acoustic structure and possible mechanical origin of the male Corncrake call
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
The male Corncrake Crex crex produces a distinctive repetitive call whose acoustic structure suggests a mechanically constrained sound-production system rather than a conventional tonal vocalisation. Here I describe observations obtained from approximately 800 field recordings made on Skye between 2020 and 2026 and develop a testable hypothesis for the origin of the long-duration and repetitive [...]
Dietary models of primate brain evolution omit the gut microbiome
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
DeCasien et al. reported that diet, rather than sociality, predicts relative brain size across primates, with frugivores having larger brains than folivores. Their interpretation moves the discussion from sociality towards ecology yet leaves the proposed energetic link biologically unspecified. The matter arising from this dietary framework is gut microbial metabolism, a plausible mechanistic [...]
Geographic blind spots in an extreme environment microbiome catalog
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Jiang et al. present the Extreme Environment Microbiome Catalog (EEMC), comprising 78,213 bacterial and archaeal genomes, as a global resource for microbial diversity and antimicrobial discovery. Its scale and experimental peptide characterization are substantial contributions. However, a global framing requires evidence that regional data were systematically sought, rather than simply [...]
Bird community change only partially matches landscape habitat change across five decades in North America
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
A common expectation is that as habitats in a landscape change, so do communities within them. However, this niche-based expectation assumes species persist in their favored habitats regardless of how much habitat remains; geometric constraints can counter this when heterogeneous landscapes supply too little of each habitat type for specialists to persist, allowing generalists to dominate. Using [...]
Exploring fungal invasions: observational and theoretical insights and unanswered questions
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite invasive fungi’s dramatic effects on native biodiversity and ecosystem processes, the extent of fungal invasions and the mechanisms behind them are unclear. We address this gap by synthesizing documented global macrofungal invasions to assess which fungal traits and lifestyles contribute to invasions across fungal guilds. Specifically, we analyze global observations of non-native fungi to [...]
The Openness–Constraint Spectrum: Module Integrity and the Evolutionary Reversibility of Fungal Traits
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fungal traits differ sharply in whether evolution can retrace its steps. Hymenophore morphologies transition bidirectionally across phylogenies, whereas gasteroid fruiting bodies, arbuscular mycorrhizal symbioses, and obligate parasitism show little or no macroevolutionary return. We propose module integrity — the preservation state of a gene regulatory module relative to its ancestral baseline — [...]
Halophyte-associated salt-tolerant rhizobacteria: ecological adaptation, mechanistic pathways, and translational relevance for wheat salinity tolerance
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Background Soil salinization is an expanding constraint to agricultural productivity worldwide, particularly in irrigated and arid regions and strongly limits wheat growth and yield. Although breeding and biotechnology have produced cultivars with improved ion-exclusion and tissue-level tolerance, these advances alone do not fully mitigate salinity-induced disruptions in rhizosphere processes and [...]
Parasitism of an intertidal foundation species: Allometric scaling and environmental constraints on trematode distribution in barnacles across biological scales
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Parasites of foundation species, such as fucoids, mussels, and barnacles, can shape the intertidal communities that depend on them, yet their effects remain poorly understood. On rocky shores of the Northeast Pacific, the acorn barnacle Balanus glandula forms dense aggregations that provide habitat for other species. We investigated infection by the microphallid trematode Maritrema gratiosum in [...]
The Ecological Price of Segregation: Socioeconomic Stratification Structures Urban Bird and Vegetation Distribution
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
As income inequality rises, cities do not merely become less equal in aggregate; they also sort residents into increasingly separate neighborhoods, a spatial process known as socioeconomic segregation. Building on a companion study that documented the luxury effect in Bogotá using cadastral land value (Mutis & Armenteras, 2026), this analysis asks a distinct question: does the city's [...]
Understanding the Global Report on Collective Progress in the Implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: Purpose, Content, and Science-Policy Engagement
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), establishes four long-term 2050 goals, 23 action-oriented 2030 targets, and a standardized monitoring framework to track collective progress. The 2026 global review marks the first operational test of the Party-led planning, monitoring, reporting, and review (PMRR) mechanism, [...]
Interactive effects of land use change and climate drive the decline of a threatened boreal forest orchid in Finland
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Land use and climate change are two of the greatest threats to biodiversity globally. However, their interactive effects remain poorly understood. In the boreal forest biome, where species are experiencing increasing pressures from forest management and climate change, improved understanding of these effects is urgently needed. Here, we assess the impacts of forest loss and both baseline and [...]
Genomic variation in Sydowia polyspora in relation to geography and host symptom severity
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Pathology
Background. Sydowia polyspora is a widespread conifer-associated fungus with ecological roles that vary among host and disease contexts. However, how its genomic variation corresponds to geography and host symptom severity remains poorly understood. We examined whether genomic differentiation among S. polyspora isolates recovered from symptomatic Pinus taeda varied between geographic regions and [...]
What is Social Behavior? Clarifying and Integrating the Concept for Cross-species Research
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The ecological world of driver ants (Dorylus): a review
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Driver ants (Dorylus) are among the most conspicuous and abundant predators in continental Africa. Their enormous surface-swarm raids and nomadic lifestyle have captivated naturalists for over 150 years, yet their ecology remains surprisingly poorly understood, especially compared to their Neotropical counterparts. Here, we review the ecology of African driver ants, synthesising knowledge of [...]