Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of The Agulhas
Published: 2024-07-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Agulhas is a regional ecosystem subgroup (Level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Agulhas Bank and KwaZulu-Natal that extend along the South African eastern coastline. The extent of the Agulhas mangroves in 2023 is 23.0 km2, representing 0.02% of the global mangrove area. Mangroves in this province are limited to 31 estuaries [...]
Snakes (Erythrolamprus spp.) with a complex toxic diet show convergent yet highly heterogeneous voltage-gated sodium channel evolution
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Chemical defense plays a crucial role in shaping ecosystems through selection for toxin resistance and has evolved convergently across multiple lineages. Research on toxin resistance has been pivotal in understanding trait evolution, as it often evolves through a simple genetic mechanism, target-site resistance (TSR), where mutations in target genes confer resistance. However, in tropical [...]
Short-sighted evolution of virulence for invasive gut microbes: from hypothesis to tests.
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
Why microbes harm their hosts is a fundamental question in evolutionary biology with broad relevance to our understanding of infectious diseases. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this "evolution of virulence." In this perspective, we re-examine one of these hypotheses in the specific context of the human gut microbiome, namely short-sighted evolution. According to the [...]
Match or mismatch: Tokay geckos adjust their behaviour based on handler familiarity but according to the context
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Animals need to recognize different individuals, both con- and heterospecifics, to make appropriate decisions. In the wild, responses to familiar individuals may vary depending on the context, which can be beneficial. However, differing responses towards human experimenters can influence experimental outcomes. Such effects might be particularly overlooked in reptiles which are frequently viewed [...]
Drivers of phenotypic variation along a Late Pleistocene range expansion route
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how interindividual variation within populations drives the evolution of biodiversity patterns is a major challenge in ecology and evolutionary biology. By reshuffling species distribution in space and time, historical biogeographic processes have dramatically affected the structure of biodiversity. While the genetic legacy left by these historical processes within populations has [...]
Deciphering probabilistic species interaction networks
Published: 2024-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Representing species interactions probabilistically (how likely are they to occur?) as opposed to deterministically (are they occurring?) conveys uncertainties in our knowledge of interactions and information on their variability. The sources of uncertainty captured by interaction probabilities depend on the method used to evaluate them: uncertainty of predictive models, subjective assessment of [...]
Temperature-dependent differences in male and female life history responses to a period of food limitation during development
Published: 2024-07-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
With climate change, animals face both rising temperatures and more variable food availability. Many species have evolved an adaptative response to historic variation in food availability: they grow faster after a period of diet restriction (“compensatory growth”). However, higher temperatures may reduce the capacity for compensatory growth in ectotherms because individuals require more resources [...]
Bimodal seasonal activity of moths and elevation, weather and land use as drivers of their diversity
Published: 2024-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Moths are an important part of terrestrial insect diversity and contribute substantially to ecosys-tem functioning. Yet, how their activity varies with the season and how different biotic and abiotic factors (elevation, weather, land use) are simultaneously linked to moth community characteristics are still poorly understood. We analysed a vast moth community dataset from Switzerland collected by [...]
Biodiversity research in India: a bibliometric overview
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
As one of the ‘megadiverse’ countries, biodiversity research in India is not only important, specifically for India, but also for the world. To investigate the condition of biodiversity in the Indian academic literature, bibliometric analysis was employed. The Web of Science Core Collection provided data (2000–2023). Out of a preliminary set of 1090 publications, 223 were finalised with a focus [...]
Disentangling variational bias: the roles of development, mutation and selection
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The extraordinary diversity and adaptive fit of organisms to their environment depends fundamentally on the availability of variation. While many evolutionary studies assume that random mutations produce isotropic phenotypic variation, the distribution of variation available to natural selection is more restricted, as the distribution of phenotypic variation is affected by a range of factors in [...]
Repeatability and intra-class correlations from time-to-event data: towards a standardized approach
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Many biological features are expressed as “time-to-event” traits, such as time to first reproduction or response to some stimulus. The analysis of these traits frequently produces right-censored data in cases where no event has occurred within a certain timeframe. The Cox proportional hazards (CPH) model, a type of survival analysis, accounts for censored data by estimating the hazard of an event [...]
An unrecognized genetic predisposition for sperm competition in aphids
Published: 2024-07-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
A hitherto unrecognized genetic predisposition for sperm competition exists in aphids. The females of a clone are diploid for the autosomes and sex chromosomes: AA/XX (where A stands for a haploid set of autosomes). Production of males is parthenogenetic, except for the random loss of one X chromosome. Male offspring is diploid for the autosomes but haploid for the sex chromosomes (AA/X0). Hence, [...]
Accelerating ecosystem monitoring through computer vision with deep metric learning
Published: 2024-07-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Feature extraction from environmental observation data based on deep learning models has made significant progress. However, the current methods may not be optimal because of the increasing volume of data, complexity of data characteristics, and labeled data limitations. In this study, we focused on deep metric learning as a new application for environmental observation data to overcome these [...]
A pilot analysis shows that climatic conditions and resource availability along tropical and temperate gradients of the Americas impact the co-occurrence pattern of nectarivorous species
Published: 2024-07-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Abstract Aim While biodiversity trends and patterns are shaped by both biotic interactions and abiotic factors, biodiversity may vary in space and time when responding to environmental conditions across clines. However, we lack the knowledge of how biotic and abiotic factors determine species co-occurrence to influence community assemblage that can impact biodiversity trends and patterns across [...]
Mapping migratory routes: Avian conservation-focused opportunities for a pan-European automated telemetry network
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Accelerated biodiversity loss during the Anthropocene has destabilised functional links within and between ecosystems. Migratory species that cross different ecosystems on their repeated journeys between breeding and non-breeding sites are particularly sensitive to global change because they are exposed to various, often ecosystem-specific threats. As these bring both lethal and non-lethal [...]