Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Reproduction is more sensitive to warming than adult lifespan across invertebrates
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Studies estimating the effect of temperature on wild animal populations typically focus on survival as a proxy for population health. However, high and low temperatures can also negatively influence animal reproduction, and recent work suggests that the thermal sensitivity of reproduction is more important for population persistence that the thermal sensitivity of survival in some species groups. [...]
The life cycle of the tapeworm Dibothriocephalus latus in Switzerland: what we know, what we miss, and how it is sustained
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Dibothriocephalus latus is a broad fish tapeworm with a complex life cycle that requires three host stages - copepods, fish, and humans. Over the last 25 years, the prevalence of D. latus has noticeably declined in many parts of Europe, with the exception of the Alpine region. Recent studies have shown that D. latus is prevalent in fish from sub-alpine lakes, the second intermediate host, which [...]
Revisiting Taylor's law, rediscovering Smith's law: A dual framework for scaling heterogeneity
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Taylor's (1961) power law (TPL)—variance scales with mean density—originated in agricultural entomology but now spans the natural and social sciences and even the humanities. Cited over 8,000 times and featured in Nature for decades, its reach far exceeds its ecological origins. Yet TPL has been dormant in Nature for the past two decades, though it remains active in PNAS. Smith's (1938) law [...]
Lake Champlain fisheries and ecosystem in the context of the Laurentian Great Lakes: past research, current management issues, and future research priorities
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Lake Champlain is a large lake bordered by New York, Vermont, and Quebec. This bi-national, multi-jurisdictional lake shares many management issues and challenges with the much larger bi-national Laurentian Great Lakes, including a history of commercial fisheries, species declines and extirpations, sport fisheries supported by stocking, and invasion of non-native species. The bathymetric [...]
Ecological Patterns in Mammalian Vocal Frequencies: Evidence Across Body Sizes and Habitats
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Vocalisations in mammals are an important sensory modality that is used for various purposes in communication, courtship, territorial display, navigation, prey detection, predator avoidance, reproduction, and social coordination. These various call functions are differentiated from each other through certain properties. Call spectral properties are influenced by anatomical constraints, especially [...]
Chromosomal speciation through holocentric lenses
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Chromosomal rearrangements (CRs) can trigger speciation by acting as barriers to gene flow. Two main theoretical frameworks were developed on how they contribute to speciation: causing infertility in heterokaryotypes (hybrid dysfunction) or creating islands of divergence through recombination suppression. However, these theories were developed with monocentric chromosomes in mind. Species with [...]
A national checklist for monitoring Portugal’s pollinators (Anthophila, Syrphidae and Papilionoidea) under the EU Nature Restoration Regulation
Published: 2026-08-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Wild pollinators are declining across Europe, prompting new policy commitments. The EU Nature Restoration Regulation requires Member States to reverse pollinator decline and to monitor pollinator abundance and species richness. Effective implementation depends on robust national taxonomic baselines that define which species are present, where they occur and how they can be monitored [...]
Specimen preservation affects herbarium-derived leaf traits, reflectance spectra, and predictive models
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
• Herbaria are increasingly used as sources of functional trait data and reflectance spectra used in models for trait prediction and species classification. However, it is currently unknown how leaf preservation protocols may affect these data. • Using a factorial experimental design, we tested how alcohol preservation, drying intensity, and their interaction affected foliar traits (leaf mass per [...]
Daphniids avoid Utricularia on a horizontal plane
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Besides animal predators, carnivorous plants, such as the littoral bladderwort Utricularia vulgaris, also strongly impact cladoceran communities by efficiently capturing passing planktonic animals, including small daphniids, in their bladder traps. Therefore, we hypothesized these animals should avoid direct contact with these carnivorous plants. We measured the distance Ceriodaphnia and [...]
GRACE Resurvey of Central European Grassland Vegetation to study the Impacts of Country-Level Landscape Dynamics on Biodiversity
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Life Sciences
Grasslands harbor high species diversity and are strongly influenced by local management and land-use histories. In countries of Central Europe, these ecosystems were severely impacted by different agricultural policies on both sides of the former Iron Curtain in the second half of the 20th century,, reshaping grassland extent and habitat quality. These land-use changes turned border regions into [...]
Beyond single species seed orchards: A multi-species framework for tropical tree breeding and forest management
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Conventional forest tree breeding has largely focused on species that perform well in monoculture systems, where genetic evaluation, seed production, and management can be optimized under uniform conditions. While this approach has delivered substantial genetic gains, it does not adequately address the growing demand for forests that function as diverse, climate resilient ecosystems. Most [...]
Somatic evolution of metabolic reprograming: mutation limited or selection limited?
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Somatic mutations can potentially be responsible for metabolic reprogramming, but the crucial question is whether the evolution would be mutation limited or selection limited. Mathematical and statistical considerations make the case for selection limited evolution stronger, e.g. somatic evolution of cancer is shown to be selection limited than mutation limited. Although some insights are [...]
Wolf–Deer Movement After the 2021 Wolf Harvest, by North-South Gradient and Proximity to Towns using a Five-County Camera Record (2018–2025)
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Previous analysis of a wolf-enriched extract of the Snapshot Wisconsin camera network for five northwestern counties (Barron, Burnett, Bayfield, Douglas, and Sawyer; 525 cameras, 294,031 camera-days, 634,214 detections, 2018–2025; 1,856 wolf detections on 197 cameras) established patterns in the way gray wolves (Canis lupus) follow, select which class of deer to follow, and how strongly they [...]
A scalable multi-resolution framework for connectivity-based biodiversity indicators
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Landscape connectivity links local habitat condition to broader ecological processes including dispersal, recolonisation, range shifts, and species persistence, that underpin biodiversity responses to land-use and climate change. Several established biodiversity indicators — habitat connectedness (including as an input to the Biodiversity Habitat Index, BHI), Protected Area Connectedness Index [...]
Reconstructing the Early Evolution of Insect-Bacterial Mutualism through Natural Symbiotic Systems, Experimental Evolution, and Symbiosis Engineering
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
The evolutionary transition from free-living bacteria to mutualistic symbionts remains a central question in symbiosis research. Traditionally, this process has been inferred from comparative analyses of extant symbiotic systems, which provide evolutionary snapshots but offer limited insight into the processes connecting them. Recent studies of the stinkbug Plautia stali and its bacterial [...]