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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences

Conservation macrogenetics reveals the potential hidden consequences of the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires on Australian biodiversity

Jarrod Sopniewski, Rhiannon Schembri, Craig Moritz, et al.

Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology

The use of genetic analyses has become ubiquitous in conservation planning and management as biodiversity is increasingly threatened globally. Typically, such analyses are employed at the species-level, though as genetic data accrue, it is now possible to consider the genetic composition of multiple species across landscapes. Such macrogenetic perspectives can reveal the potential genetic [...]

On the Repeated Evolution of Parthenogenesis in Stick Insects

Tanja Schwander, Luca Soldini, Romain P Boisseau, et al.

Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Life Sciences

A striking aspect of the biology of stick insects is the widespread occurrence of parthenogenesis, including rare, spontaneous events in sexual species, facultative parthenogenesis as well as obligately parthenogenetic species. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the origins, mechanisms, and evolutionary consequences of parthenogenesis in stick insects, with a particular focus on its [...]

Urban trace metal contamination is negatively associated with condition and wing morphology in a common waterbird

Piotr Minias, Marcin Markowski, Mirosława Słaba, et al.

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Life Sciences

Urban areas suffer from different forms of environmental pollution by light, noise, and chemicals. Pollution by heavy metals has long been associated with industrialization and urbanization processes, increasing the risk of bioaccumulation and compromising the health, condition, and fitness of urban animals. Here, we aimed to investigate the effects of urbanization on bioaccumulation of six heavy [...]

Wing length canalisation and behaviour across birds: a phylogenetic meta-analysis of variance

Klaus Reinhold, Alfredo Sanchez-Tojar

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Life Sciences

Stronger stabilising selection is expected to lead to a decrease in trait variation (i.e., in higher canalisation). We examined this prediction across species by investigating individual variation in wing length across measured as the coefficient of variation (CV). We hypothesised that species that heavily rely on aerial feeding as well as long-distance migratory species should show higher [...]

The Interaction Affinity Between Flowers and Their Pollinators

Zaal Kikvidze

Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

The probability of flower fertilization by its pollinator is widely recognized as being influenced by species abundances. However, this relationship has rarely been formalized for the analysis of pollination networks. In this study, I introduce a simple model, adapted from physical chemistry, to formalize this functional dependence. This approach draws upon the well-established biochemical [...]

Flavonol-regulating MYB underlies the evolution of red flowers in Iochroma (Solanaceae)

Lucas C Wheeler, Maximilian Larter, Stacey D. Smith

Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

Anthocyanins, the pigments that give rise to blue, purple, red and pink colors in many flowers and fruits, are produced by the deeply conserved flavonoid biosynthesis pathway. The regulation of this pathway is thus fundamental for species differences in color across flowering plants, and a growing body of evidence implicates MYB transcription factors as key players activating or suppressing the [...]

Micro- and nanoplastic effects on the reproduction of Daphnia spp. - a meta-analysis

Ana Leticia Antonio Vital, Luca Liprandi, Christian Laforsch, et al.

Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Life Sciences

Several traits of micro- and nanoplastic particles (MNPs), including among others, polymer type, size, and shape, have been shown to influence MNP toxicity. The direction and size of these moderating effects are however often unclear and generalizations from single studies are difficult to establish. Meta-analyses, which quantitatively aggregate data on a specific topic, can be used to increase [...]

Evolvability in vertebrate segmentation

James Hammond, Callum V Bucklow, Berta Verd

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Life Sciences

The number of vertebrae in the axial skeleton of vertebrates is extremely diverse, and reflects adaptations to a diverse range of habitats and lifestyles. The capacity for heritable evolutionary change in the number of vertebrae - its evolvability - is underpinned by the process of somitogenesis, which determines the number of somites that form in the early embryo. However, despite the [...]

Socioecology and the role of scramble competition

Andreas Berghänel, Sarah Marshall, Friederike Range

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology

Ecological explanations for social organization and behavior are central to behavioral ecology. Unfortunately, the continuing mismatch between theoretical predictions and some empirical data led to increasingly complex hypotheses with numerous factors, raising doubts about their predictive value or even falsifiability. Moreover, several taxon-specific socioecological hypotheses have been [...]

Historical legacies of spatial and temporal climate exposure on thermal physiology shape butterfly vulnerability to recent climate change

Sarah E Diamond, Carmen da Silva

Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Few observations are more indelible in ecology than widespread variation in the spatial and temporal occurrence of species. Although the mechanistic underpinnings of such variation are likely multifarious, temperature is argued to be a key driver. Understanding how temperature shapes species ranges and seasonal activity not only provides insights into historical biogeographic patterns, but also [...]

Which web to invade? Argyrodine kleptoparasites differentiate among architecturally different host webs

Ingi Agnarsson, Fi-Niaina Ramahefarisonc, Heiða Hlín Matthíasdóttir, et al.

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences

Kleptoparasitism, the theft of resources from another organism, is a survival strategy found across the animal kingdom. Many argyrodinae cobweb spiders (Theridiidae) are obligatory kleptoparasites that have largely abandoned web building, relying instead on webs of larger hosts. Theory predicts, and limited prior research indicates, that kleptoparasites are not randomly distributed among host [...]

Minimal viable sound systems for language evolution

Adriano R Lameira, Steven Moran

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Physiology, Systems Biology

Human vocal gamut covers 3000 unique speech sounds comprising the world’s languages, with each new speaker having to learn the sounds of its new language. Since large, expandable repertoires are facilitated by vocal learning, this capacity has long been considered a prerequisite for speech and language evolution. The postulation of a vocal learning and repertoire size ceiling has, however, never [...]

Advancing Amazonian botanical knowledge: a detailed ecological characterization of an open ombrophile forest, southwest Amazonian Brazil

Bruno Umbelino, Juliana Stropp, Ingrid Mendes-Silva, et al.

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences

Biodiversity inventories present excellent opportunities for ecological investigations and the classification of different threats to the community, nonetheless these applications are not frequently employed. Our main objective was to determine the tree and palm community within a one-hectare areas, also exploring the association between functional attributes and the projected threat of category [...]

A novel method to estimate actual infrastructure-induced mortality by integrating sampling biases

Guillermo Gómez Peña, Marcello D'Amico, Carlos Rodríguez, et al.

Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Life Sciences

1. Human infrastructures are among the most impactful threads to wildlife. While estimates exist on the number of animals killed by these structures over a given period, such estimates typically do no account for several detection biases. Consequently, true mortality rates may be severely underestimated, as well as their impact on populations and species. 2. We present a hierarchical Bayesian [...]

Pattern-informed energetics: Energy allocation modeling for predicting trait variation and population persistence

Cara A. Gallagher, Viktoriia Radchuk, Melanie Dammhahn, et al.

Published: 2025-03-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology

Ecosystem processes emerge from complex interactions between environmental conditions, individual behavior, fitness, and population dynamics. A central mechanism driving these relationships is energetics, yet many energy budget models lack an empirical foundation for how organisms allocate energy when resources are limited. Without accounting for real-world variability in energy use, these models [...]

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