Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Dynamic pollinator networks maintain pollination efficiency during mast flowering in an insect-pollinated tree
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mast seeding, the synchronous and highly variable reproduction across years, is common among perennial plants, enhancing reproductive success through predator satiation and improved pollination. Animal-pollinated species generally show lower interannual variability in seed production then wind-pollinated plants, often explained by pollinator satiation reducing selection for masting. However, [...]
Functional traits drive the competitive assembly of ant communities and impact colony performance in competition mesocosms
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Studies along broad spatial and habitat gradients evidence that organisms’ traits can influence community assembly through their impact on dispersal and environmental filtering. However, the role of traits in structuring local faunal communities within habitats remains poorly understood. In particular, the often-assumed role of traits in affecting the outcome of competition among animal species [...]
Shifts in phenology and species ranges restructure the flowering season across North America
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Global change is altering the phenology and geographic ranges of flowering species, with potentially profound consequences for the timing and composition of floral resources and the seasonal structure of ecological communities. However, shifts in flowering phenology and species distributions have historically been studied in isolation due to disciplinary silos and limited data, leaving critical [...]
AedesTraits: A global database of temperature–dependent trait responses in Aedes mosquitoes
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Invasive Aedes mosquitoes are major vectors of arboviral diseases such as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, posing an increasing threat to global public health. Their recent geographic expansion calls for predictive models to simulate population dynamics and transmission risk. Temperature is a key driver in these models, influencing traits that affect vector competence. While data on [...]
IQ-TREE 3: Phylogenomic Inference Software using Complex Evolutionary Models
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
IQ-TREE (http://www.iqtree.org) is a widely used open-source software tool for efficiently inferring phylogenetic trees under maximum likelihood. Here, we present IQ-TREE version 3, the third major release of the software. IQ-TREE 3 significantly extends version 2 with new features, including mixture models as an alternative to partitioned models, gene and site concordance factors to quantify [...]
Understanding different types of repeatability and intra-class correlation for an analysis of biological variation
Published: 2025-04-06
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Repeatability (more generally known as intraclass correlation) represents an important quantity of interest in many scientific fields. It represents a metric for summarizing variance decomposition to identify sources of variation in an outcome of interest (e.g. organismal traits). The estimation of variance components is often achieved through linear mixed-effect models or their extension, [...]
The effect of group size on ectoparasite load and physiological markers of health in a communally-roosting bird
Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Group living in animals can provide individuals with many fitness benefits, but also increases their exposure to parasites. However, the relationship between group size and parasite load both across and within species is highly variable, potentially due to selection acting on adaptations to reduce infection risks and costs, as well as species-specific variation in the type and frequency of social [...]
Weaning age and supersuckling in Galápagos Sea Lions (Zalophus wollebaeki): Maternal, offspring and environmental drivers of life-history strategies
Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Weaning marks a critical life-history transition in mammals, shaped by maternal investment strategies, offspring condition, and environmental constraints. In Galápagos sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki), weaning age is highly variable, with some individuals continuing to suckle into adulthood (supersucklers). Using 20 years of mark-recapture data from 1890 individuals, we applied multi-state [...]
Variability, drivers, and utility of genetic diversity-area relationships in terrestrial vertebrates
Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Maintaining genetic diversity within and among populations is critical for conservation and a prominent goal of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. However, direct estimates of genetic diversity are unavailable for most species, and time and resources are insufficient to fill these substantial data gaps and meet conservation target timelines. Robust, proxy-based predictions of [...]
Long-term fitness effects of the early-life environment in a wild bird population
Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Environmental conditions and experiences during development can have long-term fitness consequences, including a reduction of adulthood survival and reproduction. These long-term fitness consequences may play an important role in shaping the evolution of life history. We tested two hypotheses on the long-term fitness effects of the developmental environment – the silver spoon hypothesis and the [...]
Pharmacophagy in Insects: Ecological and Evolutionary Perspectives on the Non-Nutritional Use of Plant Specialized Metabolites
Published: 2025-04-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Herbivorous insects can interact with plants in ways that go beyond nutrition, with plant specialized (secondary) metabolites (PSMs) mediating complex non-nutritional relationships. While PSMs often function as anti-herbivore defenses, many insects have evolved strategies to counteract and even exploit these compounds, using them for purposes such as their own defense against antagonists, [...]
Cryptic chemoautotrophic and methanotrophic processes complicate the use of carbon stable isotopes in rivers
Published: 2025-04-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
The use of carbon stable isotopes has contributed to many important discoveries regarding the base of consumer production in freshwater ecosystems. There is increasing recognition for the prevalence of anoxic conditions and the contributions of methane-derived carbon to freshwater food webs, highlighting the potential for methanotrophy and chemoautotrophy to complicate interpretations of δ13C [...]
Environmental heterogeneity mediates plant diversity and ecosystem stability in mountain ecosystems of the Mediterranean Andes
Published: 2025-04-01
Subjects: Life Sciences
Globally, mountains are highly diverse ecosystems that serve as natural laboratories for testing fundamental ecological theories, while also providing vital ecosystem services. The biodiversity of these ecosystems is largely attributed to their complex topography, which creates gradients of elevation and environmental heterogeneity. These gradients in turn influence the maintenance of ecosystem [...]
Non-native plant legacies: site-dependent effects on deadwood fungal community species and functions
Published: 2025-03-29
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
1) The introduction of non-native species has consequences for ecosystem functions including deadwood decay. Non-native deadwood is a novel substrate for consumers, such as fungi, which drive large portions of carbon cycling, but their response to a novel substrate may depend on their local communities and surrounding environmental conditions. 2) We quantified decomposition rates, chemical [...]
Coarse-scale effects of land cover and fragmentation on Pyrodiversity
Published: 2025-03-29
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fire plays a crucial role in shaping ecosystem functions at multiple spatial and temporal scales. While traditional studies on fire regimes focus on central tendencies of fire attributes, such as average fire frequency, size, and seasonality, recent research highlights the importance of pyrodiversity as a critical ecological factor. Pyrodiversity reflects the variability in fire attributes across [...]