Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Symbiotic status alters fungal eco-evolutionary offspring trajectories
Published: 2023-02-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Across free-living organisms, the ecology and evolution of offspring morphology is shaped by interactions with biotic and abiotic environments during dispersal and early establishment in new habitats. However, the ecology and evolution of offspring morphology for symbiotic species has been largely ignored despite host-symbiont interactions being ubiquitous in all ecosystems and across all [...]
Solar radiation drives potential demographic collapse in a perennial bunchgrass via dramatically reduced seedling establishment
Published: 2023-02-20
Subjects: Biology, Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Plant Sciences, Plant Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Many perennial plants in semi-arid rangelands have experienced population declines, and understanding the ecological and demographic processes behind these declines is important to slowing or reversing them. Although anthropogenic disturbances drive many declines, other sorts of environmental variability, such as the differences in solar radiation with aspect, may impact population success [...]
Conceptualizing microbe-plasmid communities as complex adaptive systems
Published: 2023-02-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Plasmids shape microbial communities' diversity, structure, and function. Nevertheless, we lack a mechanistic understanding of how community structure and dynamics emerge from local microbe-plasmid interactions and co-evolution. Addressing this gap is challenging because multiple processes operate simultaneously at multiple levels of organization. For example, immunity operates between a plasmid [...]
Extra-pair paternity, breeding density and synchrony in natural cavities versus nestboxes in two passerine birds
Published: 2023-02-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Ornithology
Most of what is known about extra-pair paternity in hole-nesting birds derives from studies using artificial nesting sites, such as nestboxes. However, it has rarely been investigated whether inference drawn from breeding events taking place in nestboxes matches what would be observed under natural conditions, i.e. in natural cavities. We here report on a variation in promiscuity in blue tits and [...]
High Survival and Percentages of Giraffe Calves Signal Areas in Need of Protection
Published: 2023-02-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
We surveyed endangered Masai giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis tippelskirchi) at Oloirien Group Ranch (OGR) and Oloisukut Conservancy (OC) in Kenya to determine their conservation potential. Here, Maasai settlements, livestock, and predator control result in lion densities less than half that of adjacent protected areas. Using surveys and photographic mark-recapture (PMR), we annually calculated [...]
Kinematics and behaviour in fish escape responses: guidelines for conducting, analysing, and reporting experiments
Published: 2023-02-16
Subjects: Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Work carried out since the late 70s has provided key insights into the comparative biomechanics, kinematics, behaviour, and neurobiology of fish escape responses. With environmental change expected to affect the physiology and biomechanics of aquatic ectotherms, there is a growing interest in understanding how environmental stressors impact the swimming performance and behaviour of fishes during [...]
Prestige bias in cultural evolutionary dynamics
Published: 2023-02-16
Subjects: Evolution, Life Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology
If the traits of more successful individuals are more likely to be adopted, the resulting cultural transmission is described as being success-biased. Prestige may be used as a proxy for success. Here, we model prestige bias as a combination of indirect success bias and influence bias, the latter meaning that the choice of a role-model depends on the number of individuals that have already copied [...]
Two-step CRISPR-Cas9 protocol for transposable element deletion in D. melanogaster natural populations
Published: 2023-02-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
This protocol generates a precise deletion of a transposable element (TE) in a natural population of Drosophila melanogaster using two steps of CRISPR-Cas9 homology-directed repair. In the first step, the TE is replaced by a fluorescent marker, while in the second CRISPR-Cas9 step the fluorescence marker is removed to avoid any possible effect of the introduced marker sequence. This two-step [...]
USE it: uniformly sampling pseudo-absences within the environmental space for applications in habitat suitability models
Published: 2023-02-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Habitat suitability models infer the geographical distribution of species using occurrence data and environmental variables. While data on species presence are increasingly accessible, the difficulty to confirm real absences in the field often forces researchers to generate them in silico. To this aim, pseudo-absences are commonly randomly sampled across the study area (i.e., the geographical [...]
Environmental insults and compensative responses: when microbiome meets cancer
Published: 2023-02-11
Subjects: Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Organismal Biological Physiology, Other Microbiology, Pathogenic Microbiology
Tumor microenvironment has recently been ascribed a new hallmark – the polymorphic microbiome. Accumulating evidence regarding the tissue specific territories of tumor-microbiome have opened new and interesting avenues. A pertinent question is regarding the functional consequence of the meeting of the host-microbiome with cancer. Given microbial communities have predominantly been explored [...]
Disentangling human nature: Anthropological reflections on evolution, zoonoses and ethnographic investigations
Published: 2023-02-11
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Human nature is a puzzling matter that must be analysed through a holistic lens. In this commentary, I foray into anthropology's biosocial dimensions to underscore that human relations span from microorganisms to global commodities. I argue that the future of social-cultural anthropology depends on the integration of evolutionary theory for its advancement. Ultimately, since the likelihood of [...]
Keep your cool: Overwintering physiology in response to urbanization in the acorn ant, Temnothorax curvispinosus
Published: 2023-02-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Winter presents a challenge for survival, yet temperate ectotherms have remarkable physiological adaptations to cope with low-temperature conditions. Under recent climate change, rather than strictly relaxing pressure on overwintering survival, warmer winters can instead disrupt these low-temperature trait-environment associations, with negative consequences for populations. While there is [...]
A novel method for measuring acute thermal tolerance in fish embryos
Published: 2023-02-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Aquatic ectotherms are particularly vulnerable to thermal stress, with certain life stages (embryos) predicted to be more sensitive than others (juveniles and adults). When examining the vulnerability of species and life stages to warming, it is particularly important to use appropriate and comparable methodology so that robust conclusions can be obtained. Critical thermal methodology (CTM) is [...]
What acoustic telemetry can and can’t tell us about fish biology
Published: 2023-02-07
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Zoology
Acoustic telemetry (AT) has become ubiquitous in aquatic monitoring and fish biology, conservation and management. Since the early use of active ultrasonic tracking that required researchers to follow at a distance their species of interest, the field has diversified considerably with exciting advances in both hydrophone and transmitter technology. Once a highly specialised methodology however, [...]
Lags in the response of plant assemblages to global warming depends on temperature-change velocity
Published: 2023-02-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aim: Current global warming is driving changes in biological assemblages by increasing the number of thermophilic species while reducing the number of cold-adapted species, leading to thermophilization of these assemblages. However, there is increasing evidence that thermophilization might not keep pace with global warming, resulting in thermal lags. Here, we quantify the magnitude of thermal [...]