Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
A Unified Hypergraph- and SuperHyperGraph-Based Framework for Food Web Extension: From Classical Food Webs to SuperHyperWebs in Ecological Systems
Published: 2025-07-01
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Food Science, Life Sciences, Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Hypergraphs generalize graphs by allowing hyperedges to join any number of vertices, while superhypergraphs further extend this idea by layering iterated powersets to capture hierarchical, self-referential connections. A food web models an ecosystem as a directed graph whose nodes are species and whose edges represent predator–prey interactions. In this paper, we introduce two novel extensions of [...]
A call for phylogenetic context to understand geographic variation and host specificity in the parasitic copepod genus Salmincola
Published: 2025-06-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Freshwater parasitic copepods appear to exhibit great taxonomic diversity. However, little is known about gene flow between species or whether there is incongruence between morphological and phylogenetic species definitions. Additionally, little is known about what evolutionary factors may contribute to speciation across various lineages. The copepod genus Salmincola, which includes common [...]
Predator-prey interactions as drivers of cognitive evolution
Published: 2025-06-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite decades of research, how and why cognition varies between and within species remains hotly debated. Social interactions and environmental variability are the leading hypotheses for cognitive evolution, but these factors fail to account for large amounts of cognitive variation. Evidence is mounting that interactions between predators and prey are a key driver of cognition, but research on [...]
Unveiling the spatial link between geodiversity and biodiversity: a multi-taxon study in the South of France
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Context: Addressing global environmental challenges requires an integrative conservation approach that spans multiple taxonomic groups and trophic levels. The "Conserving Nature’s Stage" (CNS) strategy promotes the protection of geodiversity -abiotic heterogeneity of the Earth’s surface and subsurface- as an holistic metric for biodiversity and ecosystems conservation, yet its relationship with [...]
The role of osmorespiratory compromise in metabolism and hypoxia tolerance of a purportedly oxyconforming teleost
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology, Zoology
Fish must manage the competing demands of ion balance and gas exchange across the gills – a physiological tension known as the osmorespiratory compromise. In dynamic estuarine environments, the osmorespiratory compromise may be exacerbated by variable salinity and periods of hypoxia that demand high respiratory work. This study examined whether exposure to isosmotic conditions (9 ppt) lowers [...]
Democratizing 3D ecology: Mobile neural radiance field for scalable ecosystem mapping in change detection
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
High-resolution 3D monitoring is vital for understanding ecological dynamics, but methods like terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) are limited by cost and accessibility. We demonstrate that mobile neural radiance fields (NeRF), using consumer smartphones and open-source platforms, can produce vegetation reconstructions comparable to TLS in open environments, though performance decreases under dense [...]
Demographic causes of the pesticide crash in the peregrine falcon
Published: 2025-06-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Population crashes in many avian predators during the 1950–70s, caused by organochlorine pesticides, belong to the most spectacular cases in the history of conservation and ecotoxicology. Negative effects of DDT on eggshell thickness, leading to egg breakage and declining productivity, are well-documented. In addition, cyclodiene pesticides such as Dieldrin were strongly suspected to contribute [...]
Rethinking Stress Through an Ecological Genomic Lens: From Predatory Pressures to Modern Mismatch
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Stress, traditionally seen as a psychological issue with physiological conse- quences, is now viewed as part of an evolutionary continuum. While modern stressors have shifted from immediate threats to chronic psychosocial chal- lenges, our physiological responses remain the same. In contrast, stress in the wild is acute; today’s chronic stressors keep the body in a prolonged fight- or-flight [...]
Time to publish ethically: DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology.
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
The scientific publishing market is dysfunctional: academia pays a lot for publishing, much more than the actual cost. Transitioning to ethical publishing is a collective challenge requiring to inform scientists about the problem and its potential solutions. We introduce DAFNEE, a database of academia-friendly journals in ecology and evolutionary biology (https://dafnee.isem-evolution.fr/). [...]
Prompting large language models for quality ecological statistics
Published: 2025-06-24
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming scientific workflows, including statistical analyses in ecological sciences. While these AI tools offer impressive capabilities for code generation and analytical guidance, evaluations reveal significant limitations in their reasoning for standard statistical tests. Ecological statistics typically require special consideration due to spatial [...]
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: 2025-06-20
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: 2025-06-20
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: 2025-06-20
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Coexistence solutions tout conflict mitigation goals for commensals and wildlife, often ignoring the lived multispecies entanglements. 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 [...]
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 [...]