Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
The sugar kelp Saccharina latissima II: Recent Advances in farming and applications
Published: 2023-11-20
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences
The sugar kelp Saccharina latissima has received intense scientific attention over the last decades. In recent years, interest in cultivation of the species has strongly increased in the North Atlantic Ocean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean, driven by the great potential of S. latissima to be utilised for various industrial applications, including food, feed, and biomaterials. Accordingly, current [...]
Octocoral Symbiodiniaceae, but not bacterial communities, are resistant to compositional changes from heat stress on a subtropical reef
Published: 2023-11-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Microbes are essential to the holobiome of all organisms, so when organisms are impacted by environmental stressors the changes to microbial communities can inform on the health state of the host and even cause host disease. In early 2019 marine heatwaves occurred across eastern Australia, resulting in differential bleaching across Lord Howe Island reefs. Here we examined the Symbiodiniaceae and [...]
Impacts of necrotising disease on the Endangered cauliflower soft coral Dendronephthya australis
Published: 2023-11-20
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences
Context: Diseases have impacted coral populations worldwide, leading to population declines and requiring active restoration efforts. Aims: Describe population and individual impacts of necrotising disease in the Endangered octocoral Dendronephthya australis. Methods: We quantified population loss and recruitment using reference photos, survey, and GPS mapping and described disease lesions [...]
Behavioural and trophic variation within a well-established invasive round goby population
Published: 2023-11-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
An animal’s behavioural traits can influence the outcomes of ecological interactions within their food-web, including what they eat, their vulnerability to predation and who they compete with. Despite this, few studies have directly measured links between among-individual behavioural and trophic variation. Invasive species like the round goby (Neogobius melanostomus) are often found to have [...]
Extreme events and coupled socio-ecological systems
Published: 2023-11-20
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Behavioral Economics, Demography, Population, and Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Human Ecology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Rare, but potentially impactful, extreme events in socio-ecological systems (SES) can trigger significant consequences. The scarcity of theoretical frameworks for such events in SES is due to data limitations and difficulty in building coupled SES models. We explore the effect of extreme events on coupled socio-ecological systems using two stylized case studies: harvesting of old-growth forests [...]
Breeding History of Three Mega Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Varieties (BR11, BRRI dhan28, BRRI dhan29) of Bangladesh – A Review
Published: 2023-11-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Rice is a staple food consumed by billions of people worldwide, particularly in Asia. However, outdated rice cultivars and poor cultivar replacement have led to a decline in rice productivity in Bangladesh. To address this, the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) developed three mega rice varieties: BR11, BRRI dhan28, and BRRI dhan29. BR11 is a popular Transplanted Aman (T. Aman) rice [...]
The Pest Management Attitude scale: a tool for measuring consensus between experts and practitioners in invasion biology
Published: 2023-11-17
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Anthropology, Other Psychology, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Systems Biology
Quantifying attitudes towards invasive alien species (IAS) is fundamental to understand the extent to which conservation scientists agree and can collaborate in their management. We tested the Pest Management Scale (PMS), originally invented to quantify attitudes towards invasive alien mammals in New Zealand, as a tool to quantify broader attitudes towards IAS among bioinvasion experts in [...]
Inferring diet, disease, and antibiotic resistance from the ancient oral microbiome
Published: 2023-11-17
Subjects: Bacteriology, Computational Biology, Life Sciences
The interaction between a host and its microbiome is an area of intense study. For the human host, it is known that the various body site-associated microbiomes impact heavily on health and disease states. For instance, the oral microbiome is a source of various pathogens and potential antibiotic resistance gene pools. The effect of historical changes to the human host and environment to the [...]
Automated tracking of avian parental care behavior
Published: 2023-11-16
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Life Sciences
1. Parental care may be an important source of phenotypic variation for ecological and evolutionary processes. However, it can be difficult to collect and interpret data on parental care behaviors. To address these challenges, we developed a new hardware and software platform for automated behavioral tracking called ABISSMAL (Automated Behavioral Tracking by Integrating Sensors that Survey [...]
Executive functions and brain morphology of male and female dominant and subordinate cichlid fish
Published: 2023-11-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Living in a social dominance hierarchy presents different benefits and challenges for dominant and subordinate males and females, which might in turn affect their cognitive needs. Despite the extensive research on social dominance in group-living species, there is still a knowledge gap regarding how social status impacts brain development and cognitive abilities. Here, we tested male and female [...]
Sex-specific overdominance at the maturation vgll3 gene for reproductive fitness in wild Atlantic salmon
Published: 2023-11-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Linking reproductive fitness with adaptive traits at the genomic level can shed light on the mechanisms that produce and maintain sex-specific selection. Here, we construct a multigenerational pedigree to investigate sex-specific selection on a maturation gene, vgll3, in a wild Atlantic salmon population. The vgll3 locus is responsible for ~40% of the variation in maturation (sea age at first [...]
Isotopic Evidence for Long-term Bioaccumulation of Perfluoroalkyl Substances (PFASs) in Icelandic seabirds
Published: 2023-11-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) are persistent anthropogenic pollutants with a widespread and significant impact on global marine ecosystems, particularly in the Arctic. Our study is centered in Iceland, an area where the merging of boreal and Arctic marine currents creates a complex ecological landscape. This setting is increasingly being influenced by the warming climate, adding [...]
Polyploid plants take cytonuclear perturbations in stride
Published: 2023-11-13
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Biology
Hybridization in plants is often accompanied by nuclear genome doubling (allopolyploidy), which has been hypothesized to perturb interactions between nuclear and cytoplasmic (mitochondrial and plastid) genomes by creating imbalances in the relative copy number of these genomes and producing genetic incompatibilities between maternally derived cytoplasmic genomes and the half of the allopolyploid [...]
Extra-pair paternity variation in two passerine birds breeding in a gradient of urbanisation
Published: 2023-11-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Urbanisation has been increasing worldwide in recent decades, driving environmental change and exerting novel selective pressures on wildlife. Phenotypic differences between urban and rural individuals have been widely documented in several taxa. However, the extent to which urbanisation impacts mating strategies is less known. Here, we inferred extra-pair paternity variation in nestbox-breeding [...]
Decomposing social environment effects on eco-evolutionary dynamics: from density regulation to frequency-dependent selection
Published: 2023-11-08
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The density and frequencies of interacting phenotypes create a type of environment which affects both phenotypic selection and population growth. Fluctuations in population density create temporal variation in population mean fitness, driving population dynamics, while fluctuations in phenotypic frequencies create variation in the relative fitness of phenotypes through frequency-dependent [...]