Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Indirect effects dominate ecosystem service losses in response to agricultural intensification
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Feeding a growing human population while preventing biodiversity loss is a major challenge. Land conversion impacts multiple ecosystem services (ESs), including food production and biodiversity-dependent services; yet, the role of indirect effects on ESs within this context, such as parasitoids boosting crop yield by controlling herbivores, remains poorly understood. Using species-network data [...]
Tracheal chambers as a key innovation for high frequency emission in bat echolocation.
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology
Key innovations play a crucial role in driving biodiversity and facilitating evolutionary success by enabling organisms to adapt to various ecological niches through the diversification of phenotypic traits. These innovations have been observed in different vertebrate clades, such as mammals evolving hypsodonty to graze on contemporary grasses and bats with the evolution of echolocation, [...]
MIGRACIÓN DE UN AVE COSTERA: LA GAVIOTA GARUMA (Leucophaeus modestus) Y SU DINÁMICA OCUPACIONAL EN EL PARQUE NACIONAL PAN DE AZÚCAR
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
La gaviota garuma es un ave costera migratoria austral que se distribuye por la costa oeste de Sudamérica, y que nidifica en el interior del desierto de Atacama, Chile. En el Parque Nacional Pan de Azúcar, la gaviota garuma es el ave más abundante. Durante 2 años monitoreamos mensualmente los individuos presentes en la costa. Se identificaron más gaviotas garumas en verano del primer año que en [...]
A pragmatic framework for local operationalisation of national-level biodiversity impact mitigation commitments
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Countries around the world are attempting to navigate complex trade-offs between biodiversity and other land use objectives such as infrastructure expansion, with many adopting ‘net outcomes’ policies that aim to ensure economic development leaves biodiversity better off than before. The implementation of net outcomes policies often occurs on a project-by-project basis, which can lead to [...]
From metabolism to coexistence: Understanding animal movement and community dynamics through energy
Published: 2025-03-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Recent advances in the field of movement ecology have revealed intricate links between the movement of individual animals and the biodiversity of ecosystems. Hence, to advance our understanding of biodiversity and its ongoing loss due to global change, we may benefit from considering animal movement processes. Movement both shapes and is shaped by an animal’s energy state. Additionally, fitness, [...]
Assessing rarity: genomic insights for population assessments and conservation of the most poorly known Neotropical trees
Published: 2025-03-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Tropical forests comprise a few hyperdominant and many rare tree species, but distinguishing the truly rare from those under-sampled remains a challenge for ecology and conservation. Given the vastness of Amazonia (~6 million km2, ~3.9x1011 individual trees), increasing sampling cannot solve this problem. Still, half of all species are known from three or fewer collections, making predicting [...]
Agroecological farming promotes yield and biodiversity but may require subsidy to be profitable
Published: 2025-03-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Intensive arable agriculture uses agrochemicals to replace ecosystem services (e.g. pest control and soil health) while simultaneously degrading others (e.g. pollination). Agroecological farming aims to reduce this reliance. Whether these practices maintain yields at a scale relevant to farm business viability is unclear. 2. In a 4-year replicated study across 17 English farms we assessed [...]
The origin and evolution of life as continuing expansion of viral hosts
Published: 2025-03-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Emergence of life on Earth, presumably beginning from “cosmic chemistry” and culminating in the last universal common ancestor, likely involved a complicated evolution of the primeval residues via basic intermediate forms capable of self-replication. These primordial replicators could have further evolved into archaic virus-like structures, which in turn became the precursors of the cellular life [...]
Beyond the obstetric dilemma: evolutionary maternal-fetal conflict causes health problems in pregnancy and childbirth
Published: 2025-03-03
Subjects: Anthropology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Life Sciences, Maternal and Child Health, Medicine and Health Sciences, Translational Medical Research
In excellent recent work, Webb and colleagues challenged the so-called “obstetric dilemma”—the long-standing hypothesis that human childbearing is particularly dangerous because we have a narrow pelvis but large infant heads (we are bipedal and smart). They showed that humans and chimpanzees have a comparable fetal-pelvic squeeze. What, then, causes risky childbirth in humans? Webb and colleagues [...]
The effect of sex, age, and boldness on inhibitory control
Published: 2025-03-03
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Inhibitory control requires an individual to suppress impulsive actions in favour of more appropriate behaviours to gain a delayed reward. It plays an important role in activities such as foraging and initiating mating, but high within-species variation suggests that some individuals have greater inhibitory control than others. A standard index of inhibitory control used in many taxa is measuring [...]
A Practical Decision Tool for Marine Bird Mortality Assessments
Published: 2025-02-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Given the rise in anthropogenic, environmental, and disease events contributing to marine bird mortality, there is a critical need to improve the rigor of mortality assessments. Deficits in data collection and mortality estimation can hinder a manager’s ability to document event scales and inform population level impacts. Therefore, to inform decisions required during activities such as [...]
Climate-linked evolution and genetics in a warming Arctic
Published: 2025-02-27
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences
The extent to which species might be able to evolutionarily respond to rapid environmental change relies strongly on their genetic diversity. Accurate knowledge of both patterns of evolution and genetic variation across the species range is important for determining appropriate conservation and management strategies. The Arctic is the fastest-warming region on the planet, with the rest of the [...]
Ecosystem services of insectivorous bats in intensively managed arable land benefit from adjacent near-natural areas
Published: 2025-02-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ecosystem services provided by insectivorous bats are an important yet underappreciated economic benefit of biodiversity. To investigate what is needed to maintain these services, we asked whether bat-mediated ecosystem services depend on near-natural areas adjacent to farmland. We used high-throughput tracking and genetic sequencing to determine the habitat use and diet of 128 common noctule [...]
The hidden figures at species boundaries: the mitochondrial energetics behind mating signal divergence
Published: 2025-02-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
The energy expenditure of mating signals is often divergent between species and mediates heterospecific mating, thus influencing the direction of gene flow across the species boundaries. The relative energetics of the mating signals can be underpinned by mitochondrial haplotypic divergence between species, which contributes to hybrid mitonuclear incompatibility and speciation. Here, we discuss [...]
Transferable approaches to CRISPR-Cas9 induced genome editing in non-model insects: a brief guide
Published: 2025-02-27
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Animal Sciences, Entomology, Genetics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Other Genetics and Genomics, Zoology
Despite the large variety of insect species with divergent morphological, developmental and physiological features questions on gene function could for a long time only be addressed in few model species. The adoption of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas system for genome editing in eukaryotic cells widened the scope of the field of functional genetics: for the first time the creation of heritable genetic [...]