Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Honest Signalling Made Simple
Published: 2023-11-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Honest communication is a common phenomenon in animal behaviour, and is frequently explained by appeal to the so-called handicap hypothesis by which signal costs deter dishonesty. However, the handicap models commonly used to explain honest signalling have has been subject to several lines of criticism in recent literature. This trend may have led researchers outside of the field of animal [...]
DNA metabarcoding as a tool for detecting and characterising the spatio-temporal distribution of planktonic larvae in the phylum Echinodermata
Published: 2023-11-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Metabarcoding is revolutionising the analysis of biodiversity in marine ecosystems, especially as it provides a means of detecting and identifying cryptic life-stages in field samples. The planktonic larval stage of many species underpins the abundance and distribution of adult populations but is challenging to characterise given the small size of larvae and diffuse distributions in pelagic [...]
Local and regional processes drive distance decay in structure in a spatial multilayer plant-pollinator network
Published: 2023-11-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding spatial variation in species distribution and community structure is at the core of biogeography and community ecology. Nevertheless, the effect of distance on metacommunity structure remains little studied. We use plant-pollinator network data from the Canary Islands to examine how plant-pollinator community structure changes across geographical distances at a regional scale and [...]
Covariance reaction norms: A flexible approach to estimating continuous environmental effects on quantitative genetic and phenotypic (co)variances
Published: 2023-11-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology
Estimating quantitative genetic and phenotypic (co)variances plays a crucial role in investigating key evolutionary ecological phenomena, such as developmental integration, life history tradeoffs, and niche specialization, as well as in describing selection and predicting multivariate evolution in the wild. While most studies assume (co)variances are fixed over short timescales, environmental [...]
Global Distribution of Vascular Epiphyte Diversity
Published: 2023-11-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Epiphytes are a large and understudied part of global diversity. Classic work by Gentry and Dodson argued that Neotropical, mid-elevation forests are centers of diversity for this growth form. We assessed this hypothesis with modern global geospatial and climatic datasets. By connecting growth form and occurrence data with climatic records at the same locations, we quantified spatial and climatic [...]
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 [...]