Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Sexual stings in scorpions - knock-out drug or love potion?
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Life Sciences
Conspecific male to female envenomation, though rare, has been documented across venomous taxa. While traditionally interpreted as a coercive mating strategy to enhance male reproductive success and to avoid cannibalism, this explanation may not fully account for the behaviour in scorpions, which exhibit minor sexual size dimorphism and complex courtship rituals. This review explores the possibly [...]
Resolving Indirect Effects of Large Herbivores on Terrestrial Ecosystem Functioning
Published: 2025-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
The world’s large herbivores play outsized roles in shaping ecosystem processes like primary production, decomposition, and mineralization. Contemporary management of these animals is therefore poised to be a powerful tool for holistic ecosystem management. Yet we currently lack (i) adequate understanding of indirect interactions underlying herbivore control of ecosystem processes, especially [...]
Global offsetting of the outsourced biodiversity footprint of consumption
Published: 2025-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
International trade outsources environmental impacts of consumption through complex value chains causing biodiversity loss across Earth. There is a need to examine the negative biodiversity impacts and the opportunities to mitigate and offset the impacts, as a global systemic phenomenon. Traditional biodiversity offsetting is used to offset local land use impacts but no means to offset the [...]
Reflections on an essential but elusive ecological metaphor: The Hutchinsonian niche
Published: 2025-10-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Hutchinsonian niche, a pervasive metaphor in ecology, is a sister concept to Sewall Wright’s adaptive landscape, with a shared focus on fitness. Characterizing what fitness means (and how to measure it) is a fundamental conceptual issue in both evolutionary biology and ecology. After a brief overview of adaptive landscapes and issues with fitness, this essay contrasts G.E. Hutchinson’s [...]
SEICAT+: a comprehensive assessment framework for positive socio-economic impacts of alien species
Published: 2025-10-20
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Economics, Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Demography, Population, and Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Despite their recognized harms to humans and biodiversity, alien species outside of domestication/cultivation can also provide socio-economic benefits, which are essential to consider when identifying stakeholder conflicts and informing managers and policymakers. These benefits often result from the enhancement of ecosystem services, such as the provision of food, timber, and other natural [...]
Navigating forest dieback and climate succession: Practical guidance for forest managers
Published: 2025-10-16
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Policy, Forest Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Pathology, Recreation, Parks and Tourism Administration
Australia’s forests and woodlands are entering a period of rapid ecological change, driven primarily by the impacts of climate change. The landscape is shifting from one of relative stability to one marked by uncertainty, novel threats, and complex interactions between climate, disturbance, and forest health. This means that forest managers must reconsider established approaches and assumptions [...]
A dominance-assimilated liability model for complex fitness traits
Published: 2025-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Opposing explanations for the evolution of dominance effects observed in genetic traits were first proposed by Fisher and Wright around a century ago. Over the last few decades, while Wright’s theory and extensions of it have reached the status of accepted paradigm, Fisher’s views have become widely disregarded. Here, a number of counterarguments are presented, including a modified version of his [...]
Rebuilding Diversity in the Anthropocene
Published: 2025-10-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Rapid changes driven by the Anthropocene—including shifts in climate, nutrients, habitats, and species composition—are causing severe biodiversity loss while creating new ecological opportunities. The balance between short-term ecological shifts in realized niches and long-term evolutionary changes in fundamental niches determines diversification. In the Anthropocene, however, this balance is [...]
A Modern Reanalysis of McManus’ Genetic Model of Handedness
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
We replicate and critically evaluate McManus’ (1985) single-locus genetic model of handedness, which remains influential in laterality research. Using the original familial and twin datasets, we reproduce McManus’ parameter estimates while correcting reporting errors and miscalculations. Our reproduction confirms that the model is reproducible but reveals sensitivity to dataset inconsistencies [...]
Highly conserved regulators of environmental sensing and adaptation drive domestication in gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata)
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Domestication in fish involves rapid and complex changes in life-history, physiology and behaviour under human-controlled conditions. In gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata), a species with a relatively recent domestication history, we used genome-wide population comparisons to show that domestication targets a core set of highly conserved regulators of environmental sensing mechanisms. Across [...]
Ecotoxicological perspectives of microplastics
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Plastic pollution has been in discussion from last few decades. However, in the recent days, microplastic (MP) contamination has become an additional issue of concern for ecotoxicologists as extensive research on MP toxicity revealed serious effects on the environment, chronically. Global data on the production and usage of plastic compounds, demonstrated a steady exponential increasing pattern [...]
Landscape heterogeneity moderates temporal changes in floral resource diversity
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Floral resource diversity supports pollination function and is increasingly threatened by global environmental change. Using long-term data on native insect-pollinated plants across 200 landscapes in southern Sweden, we assessed changes in taxonomic and functional diversity over 26 years in relation to land cover heterogeneity. Species richness declined significantly, while the three functional [...]
From pipeline to network: redefining scientific success
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
The traditional pipeline view of academia no longer reflects the reality of scientific careers. Reframing success as a network of paths recognizes excellence in its many forms, fostering a more inclusive, resilient, and socially engaged research culture.
Jurassic Park @ 35: Reflections on evolutionary genetics, de-extinction, and the science-society interface
Published: 2025-10-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
On the 35th anniversary of the release of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, I reflect on both technical and cultural themes of the novel that resonate in the current moment. First, I offer a concise review of three evolutionary concepts—plasticity, pleiotropy, and epistasis—that complicate our efforts to engineer organisms with desirable phenotypes. I show how these ideas play out in the [...]
The relative roles of in situ diversification and lineage dispersal underlying diversity patterns at the assemblage level
Published: 2025-10-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Speciation, extinction, and dispersal are the historical processes influencing the spatial distribution of lineages and strongly influence diversity patterns. Here, we apply a recently developed methodological approach to quantify the relative legacies in situ diversification history (i.e. diversification occurring in the biogeographical region) and historical dispersal (inferred from ex-situ [...]