Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Subterranean environments contribute to three-quarters of classified ecosystem services
Published: 2025-06-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Beneath the Earth’s surface lies a network of interconnected caves, voids, and systems of fissures forming in rocks of sedimentary, igneous, or metamorphic origin. Though largely inaccessible to humans, this hidden realm supports and regulates services critical to ecological health and human well-being. Subterranean ecosystems are integral to major biogeochemical cycles, sustain diverse surface [...]
Withdrawn: Which phenotypic traits are under selection under warm, dry climates in black spruce?
Published: 2025-06-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
• Trees are increasingly at risk of maladaptation to their environment as climates change rapidly world-wide. Although adaptive evolution by natural selection is a key mechanism by which populations and species can avoid extinction in changing environments, we have limited information regarding the phenotypic traits under selection under warm and dry environments. We answer the following research [...]
Vaccination and immigration rates influence raccoon rabies elimination and recolonization in simulated urban-suburban landscapes
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
The raccoon variant of the rabies virus (RRV) is managed in the eastern United States and Canada via distribution of oral rabies vaccine (ORV) baits. The goal of ORV distribution is to reach seroprevalence rates (an index of population immunity) of at least 60%, the threshold thought to eliminate RRV. Seroprevalence rates in urban areas rarely reach target levels, predictably leading to rabies [...]
Relative High Fitness and Large Genome Size May Lead to the High Diversification of Plastic Foragers
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Explaining variation in diversification of species across the Tree of Life is an important challenge for evolutionary biologists. Growing evidence suggests that key innovations or historical contingency give rise to high diversification of species, but the genetic mechanisms through which this process may occur remain poorly investigated. Based on fitness landscapes, a high diversification is [...]
Seabird range contraction and dispersal under climate change
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Many marine ectotherms have historically adapted to local climate change by evolving smaller body sizes, reducing their energy demands in warmer waters but limiting their dispersal and speciation rate. Whether endothermic marine species respond similarly remains unclear, as temperature minimally affects their size diversity, and the drivers of their dispersal and speciation are poorly understood. [...]
Orphan and de novo Genes in Fungi and Animals: Identification, Origins and Functions
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Genes that don't have identifiable homologs in other species have been an intriguing and interesting topic of research for many years. These so-called orphan genes were first studied in yeast and since then, they have been found in many other species. This has fostered a whole field of research aiming at tracing back their evolutionary origin and functional significance. Orphan genes represent an [...]
Spatial and environmental influences on the assembly of silk microbiomes in a social spider
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences
In nesting animals, the built environment can play an important role in host-associated microbiome assembly. However, the sources and processes structuring the resulting microbiome remain underexplored. In the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola, philopatric sisters collectively build and maintain a silken nest, capture prey, and exhibit alloparental care. We used S. dumicola as a test system to [...]
A framework for modelling thermal load sensitivity across life
Published: 2025-06-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences
Forecasts of vulnerability to climate warming require an integrative understanding of how species are exposed to, are damaged by, and recover from thermal stress in natural environments. The sensitivity of species to temperature depends on the frequency, duration, and magnitude of thermal stress. Thus, there is a generally recognised need to move beyond physiological metrics based solely on [...]
Pleistocene origins of cultural and linguistic diversification: how Homo sapiens and Neanderthals differed
Published: 2025-05-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
It is now widely assumed that Neanderthals possessed a human language-like communication system. What is yet unclear is how different this was from ours. Here we ask whether the communication system of Neanderthals shared a key feature of human languages: ergodicity. Ergodicity allows linguistic evolution to continue for purposes of social differentiation without changing the species-wide [...]
Gendered male and high-income country authors dominate publication at a One Health research organization
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences, Publishing, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Authorship on academic publications carries substantial weight for researchers in science fields. One’s position in a list of authors is typically used to signal information about author contributions and status, with the first and last authorship positions regarded as the most prestigious and important for career advancement. Therefore, any inequities that exist in the allocation of publication [...]
Herbarium specimens reveal regional patterns of tallgrass prairie invasion and changing species abundance across 130 years
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
The spread of non-native species is an acute threat to global biodiversity. However, a lack of long-term, spatially widespread occurrence data has prevented investigation of how multi-species invasions affect native assemblages. We harnessed more than 65,000 digitized herbarium specimens across 522 species to study how relative abundances of native and non-native species have changed since the [...]
Social plasticity across contexts in bobwhite quail
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
An animal’s social network centrality has been linked to social benefits. However, the inverse effect of providing benefits to conspecifics on one’s centrality has received less attention. We investigated effects of foraging success, and accompanying food access provided to others, on an individual’s relationships in multiple social contexts using three captive groups of bobwhite quail (Colinus [...]
Exploring the factors underlying adaptive social plasticity in foragers using an agent-based model
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Recent studies in group-living species suggest that being a valuable group member (a source of information or other resources) should increase social connectedness. This is because individuals may recognize and associate more with valuable individuals to increase the chances of benefiting from their activity, a process we refer to here as adaptive social plasticity. However, it is still unclear [...]
The role of touch in marine mammal sociality: a review and future directions
Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences
While social living has many advantages, it also has significant challenges associated with differences in individual interests, abilities, and intentions. Individuals in social species rely on diverse behaviours and signals across senses to mediate their relationships. In some species—particularly primates—touch plays a key role in establishing, affirming, and repairing social bonds. However, [...]
Impacts of carbon farming practices on biodiversity at the farm scale
Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Biodiversity loss from intensive agriculture poses a major threat to the long-term sustainability and resilience of food production systems. Sustainable land management practices, such as carbon farming, offer promising alternatives, but their biodiversity impacts and the most effective methods for detecting these impacts remain poorly understood. 2. We surveyed 19 farms in boreal Finland to [...]