Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
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 [...]
Free-ranging dogs in the streets: foreseeing a multispecies coexistence crisis beyond shortsighted kindness or conflicts
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Nature-based solutions tout climate goals, often ignoring the lived entanglements of multispecies coexistence. Tropical cities have become battlegrounds of misguided kindness and escalating conflicts with animals. Human niche expansion creates a paradox for free-ranging denizens: abundant food sources from waste, yet unprecedented ecological pressures from infrastructural neglect. Using dogs’ [...]
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
1. 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 [...]
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 [...]
Nutritional needs and social bonds: how early-life dependencies shape meerkat sociality
Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Across species, social systems vary in their extent of interactions, competition, cooperation, and cohesion. Though there has been considerable research on overall social structures, the dynamics of how an individual's social niche develops during early life and how biological needs of offspring shape sociality has received less attention. In this study, we took a longitudinal approach targeting [...]
High-frequency eDNA metabarcoding survey data of coastal fish across the Japanese Archipelago
Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The Japanese archipelago, spanning over 3,000 km from subarctic to subtropical zones (approximately 24°N to 45°N), hosts a diverse array of coastal fish communities shaped by pronounced latitudinal gradients. Here, we present a high-frequency environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding dataset of coastal fishes collected across the archipelago. Using the MiFish primer set targeting a hypervariable [...]
Going Global by Going Local: Impacts and Opportunities of Geographically Focused Data Integration
Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Biodiversity conservation is a global challenge that requires the integration of global and local data. Expanding global data infrastructures have opened unprecedented opportunities for biodiversity data storage, curation, and dissemination. Within one such infrastructure – the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) – these benefits are achieved by aggregating data from over 100 regional [...]
Multiple global-change drivers and cascading effects in Mediterranean ecosystems: Lessons from an iconic national park
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Historically, Mediterranean systems, particularly the Mediterranean Basin, have been substantially impacted by multiple regional-scale disturbances resulting from complex interactive effects of global-change drivers. However, such effects are typically studied on isolated groups of organisms, often disregarding how ecological processes such as biotic interactions affect ecosystem responses to [...]
Light color and nutrient availability alter trophic transfer from algae to zooplankton
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Freshwater plankton communities experience both natural variation of light color and nutrient availability and shifts due to eutrophication and brownification. These changes can alter algal community structure, but whether variation of light color impacts trophic transfer from algae to zooplankton is unknown because most research ignores color and focuses on light intensity. We used microcosms [...]
Forest composition and diversity buffer microclimates and enhance productivity
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Trees can buffer forest ecosystems against climate extremes, creating microenvironments that support diverse plant communities. We asked how diverse tree communities could influence the above- and below-ground moisture environment, thereby linking tree diversity and ecosystem function. To address this question, we integrated remotely sensed forest structure, growth inventories, microclimate [...]
Enhancing motivation to learn about the ocean through VR underwater field skills in a Higher Education setting
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly recognised as a tool for enhancing engagement and motivation in education. This is particularly true where access to experiential learning is limited, as is often the case in marine ecology courses. However, evaluations of the effectiveness of VR as a teaching and learning tool in higher education is limited. Here, we use the Explore experience developed by [...]
Elevating the importance of Risk of Bias assessment for ecology and evolution
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are key evidence synthesis methods informing research and policy. An assessment of the Risk of Bias (RoB) in included studies is normally considered an essential component of these. However, RoB assessment is rare in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), and tools from other fields are seldom adopted. To identify reasons for this limited uptake, we surveyed [...]