Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
mpmsim: An R package for simulating matrix population models
Published: 2024-09-27
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Matrix population models (MPMs) are widely used in ecology and evolution to explore population dynamics, including assessing management impacts and extinction risk. In comparative studies, MPMs can be used to test life history theory or investigate macro-evolutionary patterns in demographic traits. 2. Simulated MPMs can help researchers explore the effects of life cycle structure, vital rate [...]
Mega Rice (Oryza sativa) Varieties of Bangladesh: A Comprehensive Review of the Breeding History and Production of BR11, BRRI dhan28, and BRRI dhan29
Published: 2024-09-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Prior to the Green Revolution in the 1960s, rice cultivation in Bangladesh primarily relied on local landraces, which were characterized by low yield potential and undesirable agronomic traits. However, the establishment of the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) in 1970 marked a significant turning point, leading to steady advancements in rice production. To date, BRRI has developed 113 [...]
Do environmental fluctuations during development affect trait variation? An experimental test with salinity
Published: 2024-09-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is a driver of extinction, with extreme events occurring more frequently. It increases both the amount and variability in environmental stress that organisms experience. In novel environments, greater intra-specific trait variation increases the opportunity for natural selection as individuals with fortuitously advantageous trait expression may thrive. Many studies focus on changes [...]
Developing Machine Learning Applications for Population Genetic Inference: Ensuring Precise Terminology and Robust Implementation
Published: 2024-09-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Machine learning applications for population genetic inference are emerging due to their potential to leverage large-scale genomic datasets, offering insights that traditional statistical methods may overlook. However, I have identified certain recurring issues. First, there is sometimes confusion between power and recall, and between the false discovery rate and one minus precision. These terms [...]
Making sense of the virome in light of evolution and ecology
Published: 2024-09-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding the patterns and drivers of viral prevalence and abundance is of key importance for understanding pathogen emergence. Over the last decade, metagenomic sequencing has exponentially expanded our knowledge of the diversity and evolution of viruses associated with all domains of life. However, as most of these ‘virome’ studies are primarily descriptive, our understanding of the [...]
Spatial connectivity through mountains and deserts drove South American scorpion's dispersal
Published: 2024-09-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
We inferred the geographic dispersal routes and the environmental conditions that shaped the ~30-million-years historical biogeography of Brachistosternus scorpions in South America. We evaluated the role that altitude and aridity had on the geographic distance that each species dispersed from the location of the genus common ancestor. Based on previous studies, we evaluated the hypothesis [...]
Does heat tolerance vary with rates of oxygen production in photosymbiotic cnidarians?
Published: 2024-09-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Oxygen acquisition and delivery to tissues is believed to be a key factor in heat tolerance, but testing this link has been challenging due to methodological limitations in separating processes related to oxygen acquisition and oxygen delivery. In this study, we altered tissue oxygenation by manipulating light intensity using cnidarians that host endosymbiotic algae as a model. We first verified [...]
Growth decline in European beech associated with temperature-driven increase in reproductive allocation
Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Climate change is impacting forests in complex ways, with indirect effects arising from interactions between tree growth and reproduction often overlooked. Our 43-year study of European beech (Fagus sylvatica), showed that rising summer temperatures since 2005 have led to more frequent seed production events. This shift increases reproductive effort but depletes the trees' stored resources due to [...]
Intraspecific competition along different life stages can stabilize coexistence among dragonflies and damselflies
Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Biodiversity is sustained by stabilizing mechanisms of coexistence that inhibit species of competitive exclusion. Yet, in organisms with complex life cycles competitive dynamics may vary according to the life stage. Dragonflies are optimal organisms to test these ideas, as aquatic larvae are generalists in their feeding behavior, but adults have a wide variety of sexual behaviors. In this way, we [...]
Widespread decline of ground beetles in Germany
Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Many insect species are facing existential crises, primarily due to diverse human-induced activities. Most insect assessments, however, are based on short-term data or some iconic species. Here, in close collaboration with taxonomic experts from natural history societies, we compiled the best available occurrence data for ground beetles in Germany, estimated the changes in species occupancy over [...]
How might turbulence affect animal flight in a changing world?
Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Scaling in Nervous Systems
Published: 2024-09-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
On the Origin of Nightjars (Caprimulgidae): Perspectives from the Fossil Record
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology
Fossils represent the only direct evidence for the ancestral morphologies, antiquity, and historical geographic distributions of life on Earth. The fossil record of the avian clade Strisores (which includes nightjars, oilbirds, potoos, frogmouths, owlet-nightjars, treeswifts, swifts, and hummingbirds) has been richly documented by avian standards, with well-corroborated stem-group representatives [...]
The radiation and geographic expansion of primates through diverse climates
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
One of the most influential hypotheses about primate evolution postulates that their origin, radiation, and major dispersals were associated with exceptionally warm conditions in tropical forests at northern latitudes (henceforth the warm tropical forest hypothesis). However, this notion has proven difficult to test given the overall uncertainty about both geographic locations and paleoclimates [...]
A Practical Guide to Quantifying Ecological Coexistence
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Coexistence is simultaneously one of the most fundamental concepts of ecology, and one of the most difficult to define and quantify. A particular challenge is that, despite a well-developed body of research on the subject, several different schools of thought have developed over the past century, leading to multiple independent, and largely isolated, branches of literature with distinct [...]