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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences

Wing length canalisation and behaviour across birds: a phylogenetic meta-analysis of variance

Klaus Reinhold, Alfredo Sanchez-Tojar

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Life Sciences

Stronger stabilising selection is expected to lead to a decrease in trait variation (i.e., in higher canalisation). We examined this prediction across species by investigating individual variation in wing length across measured as the coefficient of variation (CV). We hypothesised that species that heavily rely on aerial feeding as well as long-distance migratory species should show higher [...]

The Interaction Affinity Between Flowers and Their Pollinators

Zaal Kikvidze

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

It is a common knowledge that the probability of the fertilisation of a flower by its pollinator is a function of species abundances. However, this relation was rarely formalised for analysing pollination networks. In this opinion paper, a simple model borrowed from physical chemistry is introduced to formalise this functional dependence. This led to a well-known biochemical concept of affinity, [...]

MYB regulator of ‘colorless’ flavonols underlies the evolution of red flowers in Iochroma (Solanaceae)

Lucas C Wheeler, Maximilian Larter, Stacey D. Smith

Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

Anthocyanins, the pigments that give rise to blue, purple, red and pink colors in many flowers and fruits, are produced by the deeply conserved flavonoid biosynthesis pathway. The regulation of this pathway is thus fundamental for species differences in color across flowering plants, and a growing body of evidence implicates MYB transcription factors as key players activating or suppressing the [...]

Micro- and nanoplastic effects on the reproduction of Daphnia spp. - a meta-analysis

Ana Leticia Antonio Vital, Luca Liprandi, Christian Laforsch, et al.

Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Life Sciences

Several traits of micro- and nanoplastic particles (MNPs), including among others, polymer type, size, and shape, have been shown to influence MNP toxicity. The direction and size of these moderating effects are however often unclear and generalizations from single studies are difficult to establish. Meta-analyses, which quantitatively aggregate data on a specific topic, can be used to increase [...]

Evolvability in vertebrate segmentation

James Hammond, Callum V Bucklow, Berta Verd

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Life Sciences

The number of vertebrae in the axial skeleton of vertebrates is extremely diverse, and reflects adaptations to a diverse range of habitats and lifestyles. The capacity for heritable evolutionary change in the number of vertebrae - its evolvability - is underpinned by the process of somitogenesis, which determines the number of somites that form in the early embryo. However, despite the [...]

Socioecology and the role of scramble competition

Andreas Berghänel, Sarah Marshall, Friederike Range

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology

Ecological explanations for social organization and behavior are central to behavioral ecology. Unfortunately, the continuing mismatch between theoretical predictions and some empirical data led to increasingly complex hypotheses with numerous factors, raising doubts about their predictive value or even falsifiability. Moreover, several taxon-specific socioecological hypotheses have been [...]

Historical legacies of spatial and temporal climate exposure on thermal physiology shape butterfly vulnerability to recent climate change

Sarah E Diamond, Carmen da Silva

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Few observations are more indelible in ecology than widespread variation in the spatial and temporal occurrence of species. Although the mechanistic underpinnings of such variation are likely multifarious, temperature is argued to be a key driver. Understanding how temperature shapes species ranges and seasonal activity not only provides insights into historical biogeographic patterns, but also [...]

Which web to invade? Argyrodine kleptoparasites differentiate among architecturally different host webs

Ingi Agnarsson, Fi-Niaina Ramahefarisonc, Heiða Hlín Matthíasdóttir, et al.

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences

Kleptoparasitism, the theft of resources from another organism, is a survival strategy found across the animal kingdom. Many argyrodinae cobweb spiders (Theridiidae) are obligatory kleptoparasites that have largely abandoned web building, relying instead on webs of larger hosts. Theory predicts, and limited prior research indicates, that kleptoparasites are not randomly distributed among host [...]

Minimal viable sound systems for language evolution

Adriano R Lameira, Steven Moran

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Physiology, Systems Biology

Human vocal gamut covers 3000 unique speech sounds comprising the world’s languages, with each new speaker having to learn the sounds of its new language. Since large, expandable repertoires are facilitated by vocal learning, this capacity has long been considered a prerequisite for speech and language evolution. The postulation of a vocal learning and repertoire size ceiling has, however, never [...]

Advancing Amazonian botanical knowledge: a detailed ecological characterization of an open ombrophile forest, southwest Amazonian Brazil

Bruno Umbelino, Juliana Stropp, Ingrid Mendes-Silva, et al.

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences

Biodiversity inventories present excellent opportunities for ecological investigations and the classification of different threats to the community, nonetheless these applications are not frequently employed. Our main objective was to determine the tree and palm community within a one-hectare areas, also exploring the association between functional attributes and the projected threat of category [...]

A novel method to estimate actual infrastructure-induced mortality by integrating sampling biases

Guillermo Gómez Peña, Marcello D'Amico, Carlos Rodríguez, et al.

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences

1. Human infrastructures are among the most impactful threads to wildlife. While estimates exist on the number of animals killed by these structures over a given period, such estimates typically do no account for several detection biases. Consequently, true mortality rates may be severely underestimated, as well as their impact on populations and species. 2. We present a hierarchical Bayesian [...]

Pattern-informed energetics: Energy allocation modeling for predicting trait variation and population persistence

Cara A. Gallagher, Viktoriia Radchuk, Melanie Dammhahn, et al.

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology

Energetics drive emergent ecosystem processes, shaping behavior and population dynamics in response to environmental conditions. While energy budget models can be used to effectively link resource dynamics to fitness outcomes, they often lack empirical grounding for energy allocation under resource constraints.  Here, we introduce the Pattern-Informed Energetics (PIE) framework, which [...]

AmphiTherm: a comprehensive database of amphibian thermal tolerance and preference

Patrice Pottier, Rachel Rui Ying Oh, Pietro Pollo, et al.

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Thermal traits are crucial to our understanding of the ecology and physiology of ectothermic animals. While rising global temperatures have increasingly pushed research towards the study of upper thermal limits, lower thermal limits and thermal preferences are essential for defining the thermal niche of ectotherms. Through a systematic review of the literature in seven languages, we expanded an [...]

The Physical and Chemical Basis for Temperature Effects on Metabolic Rate and Biological Processes – A Brief History

Mark Ritchie, Jose Ignacio Arroyo

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Life Sciences

IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Java Transitional

Frida Sidik, Dhira Saputra, Yaya Ihya Ulumuddin, et al.

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Life Sciences

Mangroves of the Java Transitional is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Southern Java and Cocos-Keeling/Christmas Island. The Java Transitional mangrove province mapped extent in 2020 was 159.9 km2, representing 0.1% of the global mangrove area. The biota is characterized by 34 species of true mangroves. Java [...]

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