Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Age-related shifts in dietary and oviposition preferences and steep costs of modest parental ageing in Drosophila melanogaster
Published: 2026-07-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Nutritional requirements vary across sexes and throughout an organism’s lifetime, and are predicted to influence dietary preferences to maximise fitness. However, the consequences of age-related changes in dietary preferences within and across generations are unknown. This is an important omission, as age-related changes in nutrient intake could have direct, sex-specific effects on offspring. We [...]
Configuration coefficients can mislead conservation inference from beta diversity in fragmented landscapes
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Beta diversity informs reserve design and connectivity planning because compositional turnover links local assemblages to regional diversity. However, the conservation meaning of a beta-diversity pattern depends on the mechanism that generates it, not on the sign of a landscape-configuration coefficient alone. I use a recent Atlantic Forest tree beta-diversity analysis (Kramer et al. 2026, Global [...]
GLYPTEMYS INSCULPTA (Wood Turtle) PREDATION.
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Glyptemys insculpta is a semi-aquatic emydid turtle native to the midwestern and northeastern United States and eastern Canada. This species is imperiled across much of its range and is legally protected in all states and provinces where it occurs. In this report, we document G. insculpta egg predation by Peromyscus maniculatus bairdii (Prairie Deer Mouse), which occurred within a two-week period [...]
The emergence and persistence of partial migration
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Partial migration, where some individuals in a population migrate while others remain resident, is a widespread and complex behavioural phenomenon arising from the interplay of genetic, developmental, social, and environmental processes. These mechanisms often interact, as migratory strategies can be shaped by genetic variation, individual experience, social learning, and fluctuating [...]
The first successful use of a robot seed planter in seagrass restoration
Published: 2026-07-29
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
The global decline of seagrass meadows has intensified efforts to restore these foundational coastal ecosystems, yet restoration remains constrained by the inability to deliver seeds consistently, accurately, and efficiently over ecologically meaningful spatial scales. While underwater robotics have increasingly been proposed to overcome these operational bottlenecks, there is currently little [...]
Nervous system centralization as the evolutionary scaffold for body segmentation: A review of the evidence
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics
The evolutionary origins of two major bilaterian innovations, the centralized nervous system and the segmented body plan, have both been debated as cases of homology versus convergence, often using strikingly similar arguments. Here we review the comparative developmental genetics of both processes across the three segmented animal phyla (arthropods, annelids, and chordates) focusing on the [...]
From village land use plans to Key Biodiversity Areas: unlocking Tanzania's hidden conservation potential
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
Tanzania's National Land Use Planning Commission holds a fast-growing statutory archive of Village Land Use Plans, with approximately 4,900 approved plans covering roughly 40 percent of the country's registered villages as of mid-2026. Each plan records land tenure, zoning, and natural resource management rules at the village level under the Village Land Act of 1999 and the Land Use Planning Act [...]
Climate Change Reveals Contrasting Vulnerability: Asymmetric Range Shifts of Two Dianthus Species in the Irano-Anatolian Biodiversity Hotspot
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The Irano-Anatolian biodiversity hotspot harbors exceptional plant richness and endemism but faces severe threats from climate change. We used MaxEnt-based ecological niche models to evaluate the current and future distributions of two closely related species, Dianthus floribundus and Dianthus szowitsianus. Models were projected for mid-century (2041–2070) and late-century (2071–2100) under [...]
The Capture Shift Hypothesis: Functional Decoupling of Capture and Feeding as a Framework for Coordinated Primate Evolution
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The evolutionary origin of defining primate characteristics has been explained through ecological, behavioral, and dietary hypotheses, yet a broader question remains: why did multiple traits evolve in a broadly coordinated manner? This study proposes the Capture Shift Hypothesis (CSH), a testable conceptual framework in which prey capture was progressively redistributed from the oral apparatus to [...]
Honey, I shrunk one of my gonads! Does ‘feminization’ of behaviour cause asymmetric testis development in coucals?
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
In most birds, females develop only a single ovary. This asymmetry is usually explained as an adaptation to reduce weight for flight, or to prevent damage to hard-shelled eggs by a second egg in the other oviduct. By contrast, males retain paired testes with the left one typically being larger. Coucals break this pattern: as sex-role reversal intensifies across the genus, males show a progressive [...]
Ensemble learning in ecological niche modeling of the Siderastrea (Cnidaria: Scleractinia) Atlantic complex: an information theory approach
Published: 2026-07-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Ecological niche modeling (ENM) is an invaluable tool in biodiversity science and many algorithms were developed for or incorporated into this area over the years. Back in 2007, Araújo and New outlined a framework to integrate different sources of variation into robust model projections. Almost 20 years later, surveys of real world applications show that standards are still lacking, particularly [...]
Nutrient Stress and Coral Health: Bridging Physiology, Holobiont Dynamics, and Molecular Mechanisms
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Nutrient stress acts as a multiscalar and context-dependent driver of coral reef decline primarily driven by anthropogenic interference. Decades of physiological and ecological studies have established that nutrient stress elicits physiological responses from corals, but reveal species-specific variability dependent on nutrient identity, concentration, and stoichiometry, as well as intricate [...]
varKodes extend DNA barcoding to ultrafine-grained identity, place, and state
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
DNA barcoding has transformed biodiversity science, but locus-based markers often fail across taxa, at shallow phylogenetic depths, and in mixed or spatially structured samples. Here, we test whether varKoder, an alignment-free framework that converts low-coverage genomic reads into image-based genomic signatures (varKodes), can extend barcoding from taxonomic identification to broader inference [...]
From open science to credible science: practical guidance for more transparent and robust causal claims in ecology and conservation
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Rigorous scientific evidence requires both “transparency in action” about the research process and “transparency in thought” about the assumptions and logic underlying decisions. The open science movement has emphasized transparency in action, including open data and code standards. In parallel, causal inference literature has emphasized transparency in thought, particularly around the [...]
Bacterial Evolution and Involution
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
In biology, the concept of evolution is often linked to an increase in directional complexity driven by particular selective landscapes. In contrast, involution is understood as the loss of adaptive gains achieved through evolution, leading to de-adaptation to the environment and eventually to extinction. However, the microecological heterogeneity of spaces occupied by bacteria necessarily makes [...]