Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Multilevel societies: different tasks at different social levels
Published: 2024-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Multilevel vertebrate societies, characterised by nested social units, allow individuals to perform a wide range of tasks in cooperation with others beyond their core social unit. In these societies, individuals can selectively interact with specific partners from higher social levels to cooperatively perform distinct tasks. Alternatively, social units of the same level can merge to form [...]
Reversing the North American bumblebee decline: Looking at farming practices could be a solution
Published: 2024-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Wild bee declines have been documented worldwide, particularly in bumblebees, with some species in Nort America declining over 90% in the last 20 years. Climate change, land-use change from agriculture, pesticide use, and apiculture are the main drivers. The 2.2-hectare farm La ferme de l’Aube is the research site of a larger 3,082-hectare biodiversity reserve. The study area saw a 340% increase [...]
60 million years of ecological shifts in large herbivore communities revealed by Network Analysis
Published: 2024-08-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
The fossil record provides direct evidence for the behavior of biological systems over millions of years. In doing so, paleontological information becomes a key source to study the evolution of ecosystems and how they responded to major environmental shifts. Using network analysis over a dataset of worldwide large herbivores spanning the past 60 Myr, we found that large herbivore assemblages [...]
Phylogeny of Weinmannia (Cunoniaceae) reveals the Contribution of the Southern Extratropics to Tropical Andean Biodiversity.
Published: 2024-08-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Andes are a relatively young mountain range with impressive biodiversity, but the biogeographic processes underlying its hyperdiversity are still being unraveled. Novel mid- to high-elevation climates may have served as a biological corridor for the immigration of temperate-adapted lineages to lower latitudes, contributing unknown levels of diversity to this region. We tested the hypothesis [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Tropical Southwestern Pacific
Published: 2024-08-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Tropical Southwestern Pacific are a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Central and Southern Great Barrier Reef, Coral Sea, Fiji Islands, New Caledonia, Tonga Islands, Torres Strait Northern Great Barrier Reef, and Vanuatu. The Tropical Southwestern Pacific province mapped extent in 2020 was 874.0 [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of The Western India and Pakistan
Published: 2024-08-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Western India and Pakistan is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Western India and Pakistan. According to global data the Western India and Pakistan mangrove province mapped extent in 2020 was 1625.3 km2, representing 1.1% of the global mangrove area, while national and regional studies [...]
The role of meiotic drive in chromosome number disparity between heterosporous and homosporous plants
Published: 2024-08-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
In vascular plants, heterosporous lineages typically have fewer chromosomes than homosporous lineages. The underlying mechanism causing this disparity has been debated for over half a century. Although reproductive mode has been identified as critical to these patterns, the symmetry of meiosis during sporogenesis has been overlooked as a potential cause of the difference in chromosome numbers. In [...]
Evaluating drivers and predictability of catch composition in a highly mixed trawl fishery using stacked and joint species models
Published: 2024-08-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Evaluating drivers and the predictability of catch is valuable for the management of mixed fisheries. Drivers can represent or help to identify levers for management and predictable catch compositions are a key component of simulation tools and dynamic management strategies. But modelling mixed fisheries can be challenging due to the large number of taxa, and analysis typically focuses on a few [...]
The macroecology of knowledge: Spatio-temporal patterns of name-bearing types in biodiversity science
Published: 2024-08-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Ecological and evolutionary processes are recognized as the main factors generating and maintaining biodiversity. However, how biodiversity knowledge is collated, organized, and distributed worldwide influences our perceptions and inferences about biodiversity and the underlying processes. We demonstrated that name-bearing type specimens (NBT), the most fundamental reference for the identity of [...]
No support for honest signalling of male quality in zebra finch song
Published: 2024-08-12
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Ornithology
Alam et al.1 claim to have discovered a song feature, “path length”, that honestly signals male fitness and is therefore preferred by all females. However, their data and analyses provide no statistical support for this claim. (1) The key finding — that long-path songs are difficult to learn (Fig. 4c) — is a statistical artefact: regressing y minus x on x creates an illusory effect where none [...]
Experimental evidence that phenotypic evolution but not plasticity occurs along genetic lines of least resistance in homogeneous environments
Published: 2024-08-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Genetic correlations concentrate genetic variation in certain directions of the multivariate phenotype. Adaptation and, under some models, plasticity is expected to occur in the direction of the phenotype containing the greatest amount of genetic variation (gmax). However, this may hinge upon environmental heterogeneity, which can affect patterns of genetic variation. I use experimental evolution [...]
The Architecture of Theory and Data in Microbiome Design: towards an S-matrix for microbiomes
Published: 2024-08-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Designing microbiomes for applications in health, bioengineering, and sustainability is intrinsically linked to a fundamental theoretical understanding of the rules governing microbial community assembly. Microbial ecologists have used a range of mathematical models to understand, predict, and control microbiomes, ranging from mechanistic models, putting microbial populations and their [...]
Potentiality of Metal Nanoparticles in Precision and Sustainable Agriculture
Published: 2024-08-08
Subjects: Agriculture, Life Sciences
The world’s increasing population has a higher demand for food and a suitable environment. However, using conventional farming methods and industrial agrochemicals leads to environmental risk, which is a significant threat for the next generation. So, nanotechnology can be a blessing for saving our environment and producing risk-free foods at minimal cost in an eco-friendly way. Nanoparticles [...]
Should we really predict the response of wild endotherms to climate change based on thermal responses measured in captivity?
Published: 2024-08-07
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Life Sciences
A database of foraging guilds of seabirds
Published: 2024-08-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
The foraging guilds of terrestrial birds have been a focus of past studies, however little is known about the guilds in seabirds, except for certain species and localities. To overcome this gap, here we developed the Foraging Guilds of Seabirds database (FGSdb) by compiling a global database of 311 seabird species (from a total of 346 known, representing 90% of all seabird species) and assigning [...]