Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Not All Mass Mortality Events are Equal
Published: 2024-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Population Biology
Mass Mortality Events (MMEs) are defined as novel events involving many individuals dying in a relatively short period of time. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in MMEs due to their perceived increase in frequency. Current definitions are subjective and categorize mortalities varying in magnitude and frequency together. Within this manuscript, Multiple Mortality Events is a [...]
Urban greenspaces benefit both human utility and biodiversity
Published: 2024-03-13
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Urban greenspaces are essential for both human well-being and biodiversity, with their importance continually growing in the face of increasing urbanization. The dual role of these spaces raises questions about how their planning and management can best serve the diverse needs of both people and biodiversity. Our goal was to quantify the synergies and tradeoffs between human utility and [...]
Satellite images reveal major discrepancies between mapped and operating wind turbines in a hotspot of wind energy development
Published: 2024-03-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Wind energy is an emerging challenge for biodiversity conservation, due to its impacts on habitats and species. Therefore, effective mitigation and zonation policies require accurate maps of operating wind turbines. However, the current pace of wind energy development raises doubts on how fast existing maps can become obsolete. We used freely available satellite imagery from Google to check the [...]
Community-wide masting improves predator satiation in North American oaks
Published: 2024-03-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mast seeding, a phenomenon observed in numerous perennial plant species, is highly variable reproduction across years, synchronized among individuals within a population. One major fitness advantage of masting lies in the reduction of seed predation rates, achieved through alternating phases of seed scarcity and abundance that starve and subsequently satiate seed consumers. Proximately, the [...]
The fecundity costs of building complex nests in birds
Published: 2024-03-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Animal nests provide a beneficial environment for offspring development and as such contribute to fitness. Gathering and transporting materials to construct nests is energetically costly, but the life history trade-offs associated with the complexity of nests built are largely unknown. Who contributes to building the nest could also mediate these trade-offs, as building a nest as a couple is [...]
Social cues and habitat structure influence the behavior of a non-social insect
Published: 2024-03-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences
Habitat fragmentation and loss is a known threat to biodiversity. Their combined effect leaves organisms in small isolated patches of habitat, contributing to the current biodiversity crisis. The first response of animals to environmental change is typically behavioral. Beyond the physical elements of the environment, the "social landscape" shapes the spatial distribution of the habitats [...]
Rainfall is associated with divorce in the socially monogamous Seychelles warbler
Published: 2024-03-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Divorce – terminating a pair bond while both members are alive – is a mating strategy observed in many socially monogamous species often linked to poor reproductive success. As environmental factors directly affect individual condition and reproductive performance, they can indirectly influence divorce. Given current climate change, understanding how environmental fluctuations affect [...]
Fisheries shocks provide an opportunity to reveal multiple recruitment sources of sardine in the Sea of Japan
Published: 2024-03-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Understanding the sources of recruits is essential for stock assessments of marine fish populations. In 2014 and 2019, schools of Japanese sardine in the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea (SJ-ECS), which arrive in Japanese coastal areas for spawning each spring were shockingly sparse. Abundances of eggs and juveniles also showed abrupt declines, suggesting that sardine reproduction in the [...]
Studying the genetic basis of ecological interactions with intergenomic epistasis
Published: 2024-03-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
In a community, the phenotype or fitness of a focal genotype of one species can depend on the genotypes of other species. Such between-species genetic interactions are increasingly referred to as intergenomic epistasis, analogous to the classical definition of (intragenomic) epistasis in genetics. Here, we propose the first mathematical definition of intergenomic epistasis, which formalises the [...]
Running a queer- and trans-inclusive faculty hiring process
Published: 2024-03-02
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Queer and transgender scientists face documented systemic challenges across the sciences, and as a result have a higher attrition rate than their peers. Recent calls for change within science have emphasized the importance of addressing barriers to the success and retention of queer and trans scientists to create a more inclusive, equitable, and just scientific establishment. Crucially, we note [...]
Pursuit and escape drive fine-scale movement variation during migration in a temperate alpine ungulate
Published: 2024-03-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change reduces snowpack, advances snowmelt phenology, drives summer warming, alters growing season precipitation regimes, and consequently modifies vegetation phenology in mountain systems. Altitudinal migrants cope with seasonal variation in such conditions by moving between seasonal ranges at different elevations, but vertical movements may be complex and are often not unidirectional [...]
Are microbes colimited by multiple resources?
Published: 2024-03-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Systems Biology
Resource colimitation --- the dependence of growth on multiple resources simultaneously --- has become an important topic in microbiology due both to the development of systems approaches to cell physiology and ecology, and to the relevance of colimitation to environmental science, biotechnology, and human health. Empirical tests of colimitation in microbes suggest that it may be common in [...]
Agency in the Evolutionary Transition to Multicellularity
Published: 2024-03-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
This review explores agency, behavior intrinsic to an organism and initiated by it, as it relates to the development of multicellular organisms and its evolution. We ask how agential behaviors contribute to and change concomitantly with evolutionary transitions from unicellularity to multicellularity, including the evolution of animals from their closest unicellular antecedents. We consider the [...]
Behavioral plasticity shapes population aging patterns in a long-lived avian scavenger
Published: 2024-02-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Studying the mechanisms shaping age-related changes in behavior (“behavioral aging”) is important for understanding population dynamics in our changing world. Yet, studies that capture within-individual behavioral changes in wild populations of long-lived animals are still scarce. Here, we used a 15-y GPS-tracking dataset of a social obligate scavenger, the griffon vulture (Gyps fulvus), to [...]
Evaluating Compatibility between the Key Biodiversity Area Proposal Process and Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities Environmental Priorities with evidence from Canada and Mi'kma'ki (Nova Scotia)
Published: 2024-02-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This report will demonstrate that no meaningful (non-random) compatibility exists between the Key Biodiversity Area proposal process – as it now exists and is being implemented globally and in Canada – and the biocultural priorities of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IP&LC’s)*. It is precisely because it is a global standard that no claim that KBA proposal meaningfully (non-randomly) [...]