Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Ontogenetic Carnivory Drives Secondary Production Across a Productivity Gradient
Published: 2025-07-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Ontogenetic size shifts and omnivory are central to understanding consumer-resource interactions and energy flow in aquatic ecosystems. However, how these shifts and feeding behavior influence secondary production and organic matter flow remains poorly understood. 2. Here, we quantified the relationship between body size, carnivory (i.e., animal tissue consumption), secondary production, and [...]
DrawerDissect: Whole-drawer insect imaging, segmentation, and transcription using AI
Published: 2025-07-15
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
1. Natural history museums often curate large collections of pinned insects. These collections represent invaluable records of biodiversity information, ecological patterns and phenotypic variation. A common goal of museums is to create digital versions of these records for curation and research purposes. However, traditional methods of specimen imaging and metadata transcription are [...]
Glycoprotein Structure and Function in Mammalian Immune Systems: Molecular Architecture and Regulatory Networks
Published: 2025-07-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Glycoproteins represent fundamental architectural and regulatory components of mammalian immune systems, orchestrating complex molecular interactions through their carbohydrate modifications. This comprehensive review examines the structural diversity, biosynthetic pathways, and functional roles of glycoproteins in both innate and adaptive immunity. The glycan code, mediated by cell surface [...]
A handbook for standardised measurements of regenerative plant functional traits
Published: 2025-07-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
A lack of standardised sampling protocols prevents functional traits from expressing their full potential to revolutionise plant ecology, biogeography, and evolutionary biology. Handbooks providing protocols for standardised measurements of plant functional traits allow researchers to tackle large-scale ecological questions but have traditionally focused on vegetative traits such as leaves, stems [...]
The Role of the Nervous and Endocrine Systems in Animal Homeostasis: An Integrative Review of Contemporary Mechanisms and Emerging Paradigms
Published: 2025-07-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
The maintenance of homeostasis in animals requires intricate coordination between the nervous and endocrine systems, forming a unified neuroendocrine network that regulates physiological stability across multiple timescales. This comprehensive review synthesises contemporary understanding of neural-hormonal integration, examining molecular mechanisms, evolutionary adaptations, and technological [...]
Evaluating the role of Zoo Campuses in Wild Snake Body Condition and Ophidiomycosis Risk
Published: 2025-07-08
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences
Abstract.—Snake Fungal Disease (SFD), caused by Ophidiomyces ophidiicola, poses a growing threat to snake populations. This study compared infection prevalence, body condition, and species composition between snakes found at Caldwell Zoo located in Tyler, Texas and those found in surrounding wild areas. While infection rates were similar (14.3% zoo, 12.1% wild), zoo-caught snakes had [...]
Mathematical Perspectives on Rewilding
Published: 2025-07-08
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Achieving sustainable human-wildlife coexistence in well-functioning ecosystems is a vitally important and major challenge under global change. In response, rewilding is an emerging paradigm in ecosystem service provision through the re-establishment of natural ecological processes in self-sustaining ecosystems. Effective prediction of ecological changes in rewilding projects requires tools [...]
Using accelerometer-based behavioral classification to enhance scavenger conservation
Published: 2025-07-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences
1. Human activities are endangering animal species globally and implementing effective conservation strategies requires understanding animal behavior and ecology. Advancements in GPS tracking technology, accelerometry, and machine learning algorithms are allowing the in-situ study of animal movement and behavior remotely. However, the challenge of building supervised machine learning [...]
Topological equivalence of stomata distribution patterns across vascular plants
Published: 2025-07-08
Subjects: Biology, Botany, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Stomata are ancient anatomical structures on leaves that regulate the exchange of water vapor, oxygen, and carbon dioxide between plants and the atmosphere. Acting as valve-like gateways between internal tissues and the external environment, stomata may function as locally interacting networks. Theoretical and experimental evidence suggests that local interactions among neighboring stomata [...]
Nature restoration legislation means redefining targets and forecasting progress
Published: 2025-07-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Nature restoration is at a pivotal moment, driven by global initiatives like the EU Nature Restoration Law and the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework. These frameworks pose key challenges to how restoration targets are defined to ensure they are not only achievable and measurable but also resilient to future environmental changes. This requires addressing two key challenges: setting [...]
Social information about others’ affective states in a human-altered world
Published: 2025-07-06
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
As a result of human-induced environmental change, animals increasingly face challenges that differ from those encountered throughout their evolutionary history. Whilst this has caused dramatic declines for many species, some can persist by gathering information to reduce uncertainty, thereby minimising risks and exploiting new opportunities. The strategic use of social information can be [...]
ON THE CONCEPT AND IMPLICATIONS OF GENETIC PURGING IN SMALL POPULATIONS
Published: 2025-07-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Genetic purging is increasingly considered a relevant factor in conservation genetics, as well as in evolutionary genetics. However, for a long time, it was de facto ignored when computing the expected evolution of population fitness under inbreeding (the inbreeding depression). More than a decade ago, I proposed a simple genetic analytical approximation to account for the consequences of genetic [...]
Tree Climbing for Research and Conservation: A Report on the 2nd Tree Climbing Workshop held at the University of Energy and Natural Resources, Sunyani, Ghana
Published: 2025-07-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
The second Tree Climbing Workshop, held from April 9–18, 2025 at the University of Energy and Natural Resources, Sunyani, Ghana, aimed to enhance canopy access and research capacity in West Africa. The workshop provided 11 participants from Ghana, Gabon, Guinea and Rwanda with skills in static and moving rope techniques, visual tree assessment, rescue rigging, and mounting scientific instruments [...]
A Unified Hypergraph- and SuperHyperGraph-Based Framework for Food Web Extension: From Classical Food Webs to SuperHyperWebs in Ecological Systems
Published: 2025-07-01
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Food Science, Life Sciences, Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Hypergraphs generalize graphs by allowing hyperedges to join any number of vertices, while superhypergraphs further extend this idea by layering iterated powersets to capture hierarchical, self-referential connections. A food web models an ecosystem as a directed graph whose nodes are species and whose edges represent predator–prey interactions. In this paper, we introduce two novel extensions of [...]
A call for phylogenetic context to understand geographic variation and host specificity in the parasitic copepod genus Salmincola
Published: 2025-06-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Freshwater parasitic copepods appear to exhibit great taxonomic diversity. However, little is known about gene flow between species or whether there is incongruence between morphological and phylogenetic species definitions. Additionally, little is known about what evolutionary factors may contribute to speciation across various lineages. The copepod genus Salmincola, which includes common [...]