Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
"Homo informatio"
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Did very “small-world” networks enhance the Darwinian fitness of primaeval Homo through exchanges of information that enabled exploration of resources beyond those exploitable at hand? An active inference suggestion is offered about the early evolution of human social behaviour. A phylogenetic split ~7.5 Ma (million years ago) separated paninan ancestors that were unlike today's chimpanzees, and [...]
Social uncertainty influences the optimal balance of quantity and quality of cooperative relationships
Published: 2025-09-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Many group-living animals develop and maintain stable affiliative social relationships. These ‘social bonds’ can benefit survival and reproduction, but they require significant investments of time and energy. How should individuals allocate those investments towards building new relationships (“diversifying”) versus maintaining existing ones (“focusing”)? The ‘social bet-hedging’ hypothesis [...]
Closing the Coral Life Cycle: A service blueprint to overcome the coral recruitment crisis through research, restoration, and innovation
Published: 2025-09-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Coral reefs underpin marine biodiversity and the functioning of oceanic ecosystems, yet since the 1970s they have experienced unprecedented degradation, with the Caribbean region exhibiting some of the most acute declines. Global climate change—through warming, acidification, and intensified storm activity—combined with local stressors such as sedimentation, eutrophication, and over‑exploitation, [...]
Distribution et noyaux périphériques de la Pie-grièche méridionale Lanius meridionalis en France : apport d’un modèle de distribution d’espèces
Published: 2025-09-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Cette étude analyse les facteurs environnementaux influençant la distribution de la Pie-grièche méridionale Lanius meridionalis en France à partir d’observations 2020–2023 collectées en période de reproduction. La probabilité de présence est principalement expliquée par des variables climatiques, topographiques et d’occupation du sol. Elle augmente avec la température moyenne du trimestre le plus [...]
Systematic review of heatwave experiments on plant health and survival
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Background: Heatwaves, which are becoming more intense and more frequent due to global warming, are a major threat to the stability of plant populations and ecosystems. Safeguarding ecosystem function requires a clear understanding of vulnerability to these extreme events. Yet vulnerability cannot be reliably inferred from experiments that manipulate only mean temperatures or from standard [...]
Interaction Matrices as Unifying Tools for Navigating Ecological Complexity
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Interaction matrices summarise pairwise species impacts within ecological communities into an analytically tractable format and have been central to advancing our understanding of ecosystem dynamics. However, despite their ubiquity, they have faced constant, recurring, criticism for oversimplifying ecological complexity. While suggested extensions address specific shortcomings, they often come [...]
Contribution to the knowledge of the distribution of bats (Chiroptera) in Algeria
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Algeria is the largest country in Africa and for the most part has not yet been surveyed for bat species. To contribute to the knowledge of the distribution of Algerian bat fauna, between 2010 and 2025 we surveyed 69 sites from across the country, mostly roost sites but also using mist nets. We found 19 species from six families, out of a total of 27 species from seven families currently [...]
What time is it? Interactions between trees and fossils
Published: 2025-09-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Molecular sequence data is not in itself informative about absolute evolutionary timescales. Fossils are therefore often analysed alongside molecular data in order to generate time-scaled reconstructions of the tree-of-life. Here, I analyse interactions between fossils and molecular based reconstructions of the tree-of-life, and explore the implications of these interactions for time-scaling the [...]
Irreversible evolution of plant mating system easily triggered by pollinator declines
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
BPGA: an interactive Shiny application for basic population genetic analysis of genotype data
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Education, Genetics and Genomics, Higher Education, Life Sciences
Background: Population structure and ancestry inference are routine in human genetics, yet remain inconvenient for non-experts because canonical tools (PLINK, GCTA, ADMIXTURE) require command-line expertise and careful data management. Results: BPGA (Basic Population Genetic Analysis) is an open‑source R/Shiny application that provides an interactive workflow for educational and [...]
Mapping multiple dimensions of forest diversity using spaceborne spectroscopy
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Observing biodiversity across space and time is essential for advancing and verifying conservation efforts toward global biodiversity and sustainability goals. Spaceborne imaging spectroscopy has emerged as a revolutionary tool for quantifying and tracking forest diversity, yet its application at large spatial scales remains a central challenge. We develop a framework to map multiple dimensions [...]
An evolving view of character macroevolution
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Phenotypes serve as the interface between organisms and their environments and are thus pivotal for comprehensive biological understanding. However, comparative analyses of species’ phenotypes must account for the non-independence of characters imposed by the branching pattern of macroevolution. Methods to account for this phylogenetic non-independence have historically been conceived of as their [...]
Ecological Kinetics and Evolutionary Dynamics of Antibiotic Resistance in Complex Environments
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are common in the natural environment, including the microbiota of animal and human hosts. The local physical, chemical, and biological conditions of environmental patches and matrices vary in both qualitative and quantitative aspects. Often, these conditions diffuse in gradients, creating intersections that can either facilitate or inhibit the spread and evolution [...]
The myth of the metabolic baseline: how sleep-wake cycles undermine a foundational assumption in organismal biology
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology
Basal and standard metabolic rates (BMR and SMR) are cornerstones of physiological ecology and are assumed to be relatively fixed intrinsic properties of organisms that represent the minimum energy required to sustain life. However, this assumption is conceptually flawed. Many core maintenance processes underlying SMR are temporally partitioned across sleep and wakefulness and are not [...]
Frequent shifts in pollination strategy are decoupled from diversification in the terrestrial orchids
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Pollinator attraction strategies are central to orchid reproductive biology and have long been hypothesised to accelerate speciation rates, particularly through specialised coevolutionary interactions. However, most macroevolutionary evidence comes from studies of individual genera or tribes, leaving broad-scale patterns unresolved. Here, we reconstruct the evolution of pollination strategy in [...]