Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Predator-prey interactions as drivers of cognitive evolution
Published: 2025-06-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite decades of research, how and why cognition varies between and within species remains hotly debated. Social interactions and environmental variability are the leading hypotheses for cognitive evolution, but these factors fail to account for large amounts of cognitive variation. Evidence is mounting that interactions between predators and prey are a key driver of cognition, but research on [...]
Unveiling the spatial link between geodiversity and biodiversity: a multi-taxon study in the South of France
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Context: Addressing global environmental challenges requires an integrative conservation approach that spans multiple taxonomic groups and trophic levels. The "Conserving Nature’s Stage" (CNS) strategy promotes the protection of geodiversity -abiotic heterogeneity of the Earth’s surface and subsurface- as an holistic metric for biodiversity and ecosystems conservation, yet its relationship with [...]
The role of osmorespiratory compromise in metabolism and hypoxia tolerance of a purportedly oxyconforming teleost
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology, Zoology
Fish must manage the competing demands of ion balance and gas exchange across the gills – a physiological tension known as the osmorespiratory compromise. In dynamic estuarine environments, the osmorespiratory compromise may be exacerbated by variable salinity and periods of hypoxia that demand high respiratory work. This study examined whether exposure to isosmotic conditions (9 ppt) lowers [...]
Radiance field methods as a representational paradigm in ecology
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. High-resolution ecological data are fundamental to understanding the structure, function, and change of ecosystems. Yet, the ways we capture and represent these data have remained largely constrained by expensive instruments and narrowly defined measurement paradigms. Here, we propose that radiance fields, representations that encode the color and density of points in a system, offer [...]
Demographic causes of the pesticide crash in the peregrine falcon
Published: 2025-06-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Population crashes in many avian predators during the 1950–70s, caused by organochlorine pesticides, belong to the most spectacular cases in the history of conservation and ecotoxicology. Negative effects of DDT on eggshell thickness, leading to egg breakage and declining productivity, are well-documented. In addition, cyclodiene pesticides such as Dieldrin were strongly suspected to contribute [...]
Rethinking Stress Through an Ecological Genomic Lens: From Predatory Pressures to Modern Mismatch
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Stress, traditionally seen as a psychological issue with physiological conse- quences, is now viewed as part of an evolutionary continuum. While modern stressors have shifted from immediate threats to chronic psychosocial chal- lenges, our physiological responses remain the same. In contrast, stress in the wild is acute; today’s chronic stressors keep the body in a prolonged fight- or-flight [...]
Time to publish responsibly: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology.
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
The current economics of scientific publishing reveal a profound imbalance: academia pays prices far exceeding the actual costs of publication. Rather than supporting research, much of this expenditure sustains the profits of a few dominant commercial publishers. Transitioning to responsible publishing is a collective challenge that requires raising awareness among scientists about the problem [...]
Prompting large language models for quality ecological statistics
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming scientific workflows, including statistical analyses in ecological sciences. While these AI tools offer impressive capabilities for code generation and analytical guidance, evaluations reveal significant limitations in their reasoning for standard statistical tests. Ecological statistics typically require special consideration due to spatial [...]
Allometry and shared ancestry, rather than ecology, shapes the evolution of 3D eye size in temperate butterflies
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Sensory traits shape animal lifestyles due to the central role they play in retrieving and processing environmental information. However, being some of the most energetically expensive tissues to build and maintain, ecological demands often modulate investment in these organs. Evidence that ecology shapes the evolution of sensory traits is plenty but is heavily biased towards vertebrates and has [...]
Female driven reduction of sexual dimorphism in hominins
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Sexual dimorphism is a key indicator of social structure and selective pressures in primate evolution, yet its evolutionary drivers in hominins remain contentious. Here, we combine cutting edge dimorphism estimation methods, with Bayesian phylogenetic comparative analyses to disentangle the sex-specific contributions and evolutionary dynamics underlying changes in body mass and canine size across [...]
A practical guide to species trend detection with unstructured data using local frequency scaling (Frescalo)
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Accurately measuring biodiversity change remains a central challenge in ecology. Beyond the general idea of detection frameworks, which can help to estimate species trends under variable effort, other sampling-related biases in data collection remain a key challenge. Long-term standardized ecological data are rare, and most available datasets exhibit considerable spatial and temporal variation [...]
The Indian Street dog crisis and multispecies coexistence in tropical urban futures
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Preface Cities in the Global South struggle with human-animal coexistence conundrums, e.g., in South Asia, old and new collide: people raise livestock informally and feed animals within heterogeneously developed, juxtaposed patches. Digital economies boom amidst threats from waste piles that cause zoonotic diseases and conflicts, as exemplified by the ongoing free-ranging dog crisis in India. [...]
Two Metschnikowia nectar yeast species have similar volatile profiles, but elicit differential foraging in bee pollinators
Published: 2025-06-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Organismal Biological Physiology, Other Microbiology
Nectar yeasts are a highly specialized group of fungi that may play key roles in pollination ecology. Nectar yeasts lack an independent dispersal mechanism to access new habitats with fresh resources. Yeasts, bumble bee pollinators, and flowering plants likely take part in a series of diffuse mutualisms, wherein yeast attract bees that provide phoretic travel between flowers. This interaction [...]
Predicting future damage costs of non-native species using combined dynamical and cost-density equations
Published: 2025-06-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biological invasions threaten biodiversity, economic stability, and public health, and are exacerbated by intensive global trade and transport. The economic costs of these invasions have reached US$ trillions globally and are expected to continue increasing. However, while past invasion costs have been described across various contexts, there are few robust projections of future costs, limiting [...]
Writing the pause: epitranscriptomics in the eco-evolutionary logic of dormancy
Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Dormancy has been widely recognized as an evolutionarily conserved strategy that enables cells and organisms to endure environmental stress, resource scarcity, or developmental arrest. While transcriptional regulation has been extensively studied in this context, increasing attention is being directed toward post-transcriptional mechanisms that allow rapid and energy-efficient control of gene [...]