Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Recovery of forest structural complexity during secondary succession in the tropics
Published: 2025-03-19
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Forest structural complexity is an essential determinant of forest ecosystem functions and biodiversity. The natural dynamics of structural complexity of tropical forests remain largely unexplored, especially for naturally regenerating forest during secondary succession. Better understanding the trajectories of forest structural complexity recovery is crucial to inform the development of forest [...]
Viability selection on coat spot patterns correlates with temperature anomalies in Masai giraffes
Published: 2025-03-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Remarkable variation in animal colour patterns is often shaped by heterogeneous selection, reflecting adaptation to variable environmental conditions. However, the adaptive functions of patterns and drivers of selection remain poorly understood. Shape and size of colour patterns may help with thermoregulation and thus be altered by temperature anomalies, which are predicted to be more frequent [...]
The decades-long recovery of nocturnal bees in logged forests is counteracted by broad resource range and reliance on pioneers
Published: 2025-03-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Nocturnal bees are elusive pollinators for which little and fragmented evidence of their dietary breadth is available. Moreover, despite their assumed relevance as pollinators of tropical plants, there is no information on how nocturnal bees respond to the loss of suitable habitats and forest succession. Here, we investigated the recovery of Megalopta bees, a prominent group of nocturnal [...]
Predicting interaction frequency in plant-pollinator networks
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Flowers and their pollinators represent a bipartite interaction system, whose links are hypothesised to be related to species traits. To explore whether we can predict the weight of this link, i.e. the frequency of interactions, in an validation network, we analysed 14 studies of pollinator-flower visitation network from around the world. We used information on species abundances, their traits [...]
Conservation macrogenetics reveals the potential hidden consequences of the 2019-2020 Black Summer fires on Australian biodiversity
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
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
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
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
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 [...]
MYB regulator of ‘colorless’ flavonols underlies the evolution of red flowers in Iochroma (Solanaceae)
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
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
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
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
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
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 [...]