Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
A Critique of Thompson and Ramírez-Barahona (2023) or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fossil Record
Published: 2024-01-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Last year, a study published in Biology Letters by Thompson and Ramírez-Barahona (2023) argued that, according to analyses of diversification on two massive molecular phylogenies comprising thousands of species, there is no evidence that angiosperms (i.e., flowering plants) were affected by the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction. Here I show that these conclusions are flawed from both [...]
Predicting organismal response to marine heatwaves using mechanistic thermal landscape models
Published: 2024-01-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Marine heatwaves (MHWs) can cause thermal stress in marine ectotherms, experienced as a pulse against the press of anthropogenic warming. When thermal stress exceeds organismal capacity to maintain homeostasis, organism survival becomes time-limited and can result in mass mortality events. Current methods of detecting and categorizing MHWs rely on statistical analysis of historic climatology, and [...]
Temporal changes in streamflow can predict parasitism levels in freshwater prawns better than host traits
Published: 2024-01-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Understanding how changes in the hydrological regime drive parasite loads and dynamics remains a challenging issue in ecological parasitology. Temporal changes in streamflow and rainfall are key hydrological factors that could alter interactions between the parasite and host and affect parasitism levels. However, to investigate the effect of streamflow, rainfall, and its mechanisms, it is [...]
Bayesian Estimation of Cooccurrence Affinity with Dyadic Regression
Published: 2024-01-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Estimating underlying cooccurrence relationships between pairs of species has long been a challenging task in ecology as the extent to which species actually cooccur is partially dependent on their prevalences. While recent work has taken large steps towards solving this problem, the next question is how to assess the factors that influence cooccurrence. Here I show that a recently proposed [...]
Distribution, Abundance and Status of At-Risk Birds at a Six-Acre Site Within the Upper Boileau Biodiversity Reserve, Québec: A Year-Long Research Study
Published: 2024-01-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Understanding the distribution, abundance and status of at-risk birds in any area where human impact is low is an imperative in understanding the larger ecological situation. Birds have been widely seen as reliable indicators of ecological health and there have been significant population declines in North America, especially among migratory aerial insectivores, and are escalading rapidly. As a [...]
Conjugation Related Costs Have Reduced Impact on *in silico* Plasmid Persistence
Published: 2024-01-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Due to the important role they play in the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) crisis and in microbial evolution in general, a great deal of empirical and theoretical work is currently underway, trying to understand plasmid ecology. One of the key questions is how these often costly genetic elements persist in host populations. Here I show that when modelling plasmid population dynamics, it is not [...]
Evidence to inform spatial management of a western Pacific Ocean tuna purse seine fishery
Published: 2024-01-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Fisheries can have profound impacts on co-occurring species exposed to incidental capture, particularly those with life history traits that make them vulnerable to elevated mortality levels. Fisheries spatial management holds substantial potential to balance socioeconomic benefits and costs to threatened bycatch species. This study analyzed observer program data for a western Pacific Ocean tuna [...]
Evolutionary outcomes arising from bistability in ecosystem dynamics
Published: 2024-01-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
While it is known that shallow lakes ecosystems may experience abrupt shifts (ie tipping points) from one state to a contrasting degraded alternative state as a result of gradual environmental changes, the role of evolutionary processes and the impact of trait variation in this context remain largely unexplored. It is crucial to elucidate how eco-evolutionary feedbacks affect abrupt ecological [...]
Food web trophic control modulates tropical Atlantic reef ecosystems response to marine heat wave intensity and duration
Published: 2024-01-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Marine Heat Waves (MHWs) are episodes of anomalous warming in the ocean that can last from a few days to months. MHWs have different characteristics in terms of intensity, duration, and frequency and generate thermal stress on marine ecosystems. In reef ecosystems, they are one of the main causes of decreased presence and abundance of corals, invertebrates, and fish. The deleterious capacity [...]
Non-linearity and temporal variability are overlooked components of global population dynamics
Published: 2024-01-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aim. Population dynamics are usually assessed through linear trend analysis, quantifying their general direction. However, linear trends may hide substantial variations in population dynamics that could reconcile apparent discrepancies when quantifying the extent of the biodiversity crisis. We seek to determine whether the use of non-linear methods and [...]
A photographic guide for determining egg incubation stage in the Superb Fairy-wren (Malurus cyaneus)
Published: 2024-01-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
When monitoring the nesting biology of wild birds, nests are often found after the eggs have been laid and incubation has commenced. Candling—the use of a bright light to illuminate egg contents—is a useful method for estimating embryo development and incubation stage. This information is used to estimate when incubation started and predict when eggs will hatch. As the focus of several long-term [...]
Use of a communal display area by Rufous Whistlers (Pachycephala rufiventris)
Published: 2024-01-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Opportunity Begets Opportunity to Drive Macroevolutionary Dynamics of a Diverse Lizard Radiation
Published: 2024-01-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Evolution proceeds unevenly across the tree of life, with some lineages accumulating diversity more rapidly than others. Explaining this disparity is challenging as similar evolutionary triggers often do not result in analogous shifts across the tree, and similar shifts may reflect different evolutionary triggers. We used a combination of approaches to directly consider such context-dependency [...]
neonPlantEcology: an R package for preparing NEON plant data for use in ecological research
Published: 2024-01-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a continental-scale endeavor of ecological data collection for 30 years. We created a software package, neonPlantEcology that automatically arranges the raw data from the plant presence and percent cover (DP1.10058.001) data product from NEON into tables familiar to plant ecologists. Because of the broad scale of the observatory, it is [...]
Challenges and opportunities in applying AI to evolutionary morphology
Published: 2024-01-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to transform many aspects of society, and the study of evolutionary morphology is no exception. Classical AI methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Cluster Analysis have been commonplace in evolutionary morphology for decades, but the last decade has seen increasing application of Deep Learning to ecology and evolutionary biology, opening up [...]