Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
The Development and Evolution of Arthropod Tagmata
Published: 2024-12-10
Subjects: Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
The segmented body plan is a hallmark of the arthropod body plan. Morphological segments are formed during embryogenesis, through a complex procedure involving the activation of a series of gene regulatory networks. The segments of the arthropod body are organized into functional units known as tagmata, and these tagmata are different among the arthropod classes (e.g. head, thorax and abdomen in [...]
iNaturalist as a platform for documenting Chilean funga
Published: 2024-12-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Policy, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences
This study analyzes the impact of iNaturalist on the recording and documentation of fungi in Chile from 2008 to 2024, highlighting its role in integrating citizen science into biodiversity monitoring. This community effort—which currently totals more than 63,000 observations representing 1,245 species—is concentrated in the central and southern regions of the country, mainly in urban areas, where [...]
Microbes as conservation targets
Published: 2024-12-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
A world without microorganisms would lack essential processes that support life. The degradation or loss of microbiomes will lead to severe disruptions in ecosystems, nutrient cycling, and the climate; failures in food production; and crises in animal and human health. Yet, microbes remain largely excluded from nature conservation efforts. Current microbial management predominantly relies on the [...]
Shorebirds are shrinking and shape-shifting: declining body size and lengthening bills in the past half-century
Published: 2024-12-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Animals are predicted to shrink and shape-shift as the climate warms; declining in size, while their appendages lengthen. Determining which types of species are undergoing these morphological changes, and why, is critical to understanding species responses to global change, including potential adaptation to climate warming. We examine body size and bill length changes in 25 shorebird species [...]
Don’t ask “when is it coevolution?” — ask “how?”
Published: 2024-12-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Coevolution is widely defined as specific, simultaneous, reciprocal adaptation by pairs of interacting species. This strict-sense definition arose from a desire for conceptual clarity, but it has never reflected the much wider diversity of ways in which interacting species may shape each other's evolution. As a result, much of the literature on the evolutionary consequences of species [...]
The feasibility principle in community ecology
Published: 2024-12-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
The structure and function of ecological communities are conceptualized as an emergent outcome derived from their corresponding set of interacting populations embedded in a given environmental context. However, it has remained unclear whether common principles can explain the biodiversity patterns that we observe across different contexts. Notably, finding general principles can successfully [...]
Code-sharing policies are associated with increased reproducibility potential of ecological findings
Published: 2024-12-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Software code (e.g., analytical code) is increasingly recognised as an important research output because it improves transparency, collaboration, and research credibility. Many scientific journals have introduced code-sharing policies; however, surveys have shown alarmingly low compliance with these policies. In this study, we expanded on a recent survey of ecological journals with code-sharing [...]
Assessing Transparency and Reproducibility in Invasion Science
Published: 2024-12-06
Subjects: Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Policymakers and practitioners overseeing invasive species management depend on reliable research for guidance. Transparency and reproducibility are core features of reliable research, and prerequisites for successful study replication, but are evidently lacking in many science disciplines. Whether this shortfall characterizes invasion science remains unknown. We evaluated a sample of invasion [...]
Unbaited underwater video evidences the presence of previ-ously unrecorded fish species, sea krait (Laticauda sp.) and a high frequency of sharks at a remote reef complex (Coral Sea Marine Park, Southwest Pacific)
Published: 2024-12-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology
The Chesterfield-Bellona atolls and reefs are a vast reef complex located in the Coral Sea Marine Park, estab-lished in 2014 in the New Caledonian Economic Exclusive Zone. In 2013, the New Caledonia government supported the first assessment of fish and benthic habitats conducted in all habitats and over the entire area. The assessment provided a primary knowledge base for establishing the [...]
Advancing Plant Biomass Measurements: Integrating Smartphone-based 3D Scanning Techniques for Enhanced Ecosystem Monitoring
Published: 2024-12-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
New technological developments open novel possibilities for widely applicable methods of ecosystem analyses. We investigated a novel approach using smartphone-based 3D scanning for non-destructive, high-resolution monitoring of above-ground plant biomass. This method leverages Structure from Motion (SfM) techniques with widely accessible smartphone apps and subsequent computing to generate [...]
Experimental tests on the evolution of sex and recombination and their adaptive significance
Published: 2024-12-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Sex and recombination generate genetic variation and facilitate adaptation by reducing selective interference, but they can also disrupt genotype combinations maintained by selection. We here synthesize recent experimental evolution studies on the adaptive consequences of sex and recombination in constant environments, emphasizing insights gained from population genomic data. We discuss evidence [...]
One Earth + One Health: An agile, evolutionary, system-of-systems, convergence paradigm for societal challenges of the Anthropocene
Published: 2024-12-06
Subjects: Education, Engineering, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Evolutionary mechanisms enabled humans to profoundly transform Earth systems. Because the resulting Anthropocene systems are highly interdependent and dynamically evolving, often with accelerating rates of cultural and technological evolution, the ensuing family of societal challenges must be framed and addressed in a holistic fashion. An agile, evolutionary, system-of-systems, convergence [...]
Self-organising life history selection from replicating molecules to large multicellular sexual organisms
Published: 2024-12-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
During their evolution from molecular replicators over asexual unicellular prokaryotes and protozoa to multicellular sexual reproducers, biological lifeforms increased in size with heritable gene replication increasingly embedded in more organised replicating units. Natural selection theory did not explain this evolutionary unfolding for 150 years, consolidating Darwinian evolution as a [...]
Evolutionary principles shape the health of humanity as a planetary-scale organism
Published: 2024-12-02
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A study of human social systems at planetary scale examines whether our technology, economy, culture, and flows of information are component-processes in a unified, living system. Through a biological lens of structure, function, and geographic mapping of social systems, we consider this total human ecosystem from evolutionary and developmental principles. The health of this system depends on its [...]
Home of the brave: is similarity of defensive behavior of Neotropical snakes (Dipsadidae: Pseudoboini) predicted by sympatry?
Published: 2024-11-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Predation is a strong driver of prey behavior and sympatric species are exposed to similar selective predatory pressures.We test the hypothesis that this leads to similar anti-predator behaviors using the widespread Neotropical snake tribe Pseudoboini. We reviewed and compiled documented defensive behaviors for all species, adding new unreported behaviors for three species. We used a cluster [...]