Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Environmental gradients shape community composition, energy pathways, and trophic dynamics in a coastal Arctic food web
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
A central question in ecology is how environmental heterogeneity structures community composition and trophic organization, and whether changes in physical conditions alter energy pathways without changing overall network connectivity. Arctic food webs have generally been quantified at broader spatial scales which must average spatial heterogeneity, limiting the ability to quantify asymmetric [...]
Critical methodological flaws in Feurer et al. (2025) render its findings untrustworthy
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Forestry and Forest Sciences
A recent article by Feurer et al. (2025) aimed to synthesise literature on the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation globally. The stated aim of the review, to assess what are the proximate causes and underlying drivers of deforestation and forest degradation worldwide, is timely and relevant for ongoing policy efforts, for example zero-deforestation commitments and EU Deforestation [...]
Eelgrass-associated fishes show large interspecific differences in thermal acclimation to marine heatwaves
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Global warming is increasingly exposing shallow coastal habitats to thermal extremes, with important consequences for the fish species they support. Eelgrass (Zostera marina), the most widespread seagrass in the Northern Hemisphere, provides nursery habitats and foraging opportunities for a high diversity of temperate fishes. However, light limitation is compressing eelgrass depth distribution to [...]
Superorganismal Anisogamy: a Comparative Test of an Extended Theory
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Multicellular organisms and superorganisms (e.g., ant colonies) are both products of major evolutionary transitions in individuality, and they share many analogous traits. Theory developed to explain the evolution of one such trait, anisogamy, has recently been adapted to explain its superorganismal analogue: large egg-like queens and small sperm-like males. To test this theory with comparative [...]
First Report of Bilateral Gynandromorphism in the Australian Ant, Dolichoderus scrobiculatus (Mayr, 1876) (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Life Sciences
Gynandromorphism is a rare developmental phenomenon producing genetically chimeric individuals expressing both male and female phenotypes simultaneously. Here, I describe the morphological anomalies arising from a case of bilateral worker-male gynandromorphism in the Australian ant Dolichoderus scrobiculatus (Mayr, 1876), collected during a pitfall survey of native ant fauna. The specimen [...]
Closing the border on Australia’s domestic elephant ivory trade
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Law, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Australia’s domestic market for elephant (Elephantidae ssp.) ivory remains active online, despite long-standing international controls and pledges to close domestic trade. We conducted snapshot monitoring of surface-web vendors (online auction houses and webstores with ‘buy-it-now’ payment options) and a survey of Facebook Marketplace posts made between January and June 2025, sampled every two [...]
Integrating general and targeted biodiversity monitoring through parallel survey designs to improve indicator robustness
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Breeding Bird Monitoring Schemes (BMS) provide large-scale, long-term data essential for biodiversity assessment and conservation decision-making. However, their multispecies design can generate species-specific detectability biases, particularly for taxa whose behavioral or ecological traits deviate from standardized count assumptions, potentially affecting abundance estimates and population [...]
General flowering in temperate forests arises from multi-timescale community synchrony
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Community-wide “general flowering” has been regarded as a tropical phenomenon. Here, we show that temperate forests also exhibit community-wide flowering at the regional scale. Annual seed-production records for seven dominant tree species across 432 forest sites, analysed with timescale-explicit wavelet metrics, reveal landscape-scale synchrony structured by two periods — a 2–4-year band and a [...]
Factors influencing the use of scientific evidence in conservation practice and policy: insights from a systematic map
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Evidence-based conservation can lead to better outcomes for biodiversity, through the integration of scientific evidence with other forms of knowledge to make transparent and effective decisions. However, despite efforts to promote evidence-based practice, many management and policy decisions do not incorporate scientific information. To strengthen the interface between science and [...]
Systematic review of triploidy among parasitic worms
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Parasitic worms have significant medical, veterinary, and economic importance. Numerous studies have therefore addressed various aspects of parasitic worms’ biology. In contrast, the ploidy of parasitic worms remains comparatively understudied, despite a few known triploid species. Polyploidy is known to have phenotypic and genetic effects in animals, which can lead to changes at the evolutionary [...]
What is a plant chemotype anyway?
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Many plant species show chemical polymorphisms regarding the composition of specialized metabolites belonging to certain chemical families. This led to the classification of chemotypes, that is, groups of plants that can be distinguished by their chemical profiles of metabolites within one chemical family. We present existing definitions and approaches for classifying chemotypes, and describe [...]
Putting the ‘Adaptive’ in Adaptive Monitoring: From Fast Data to Meaningful Ecological Change
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite repeated calls for ‘adaptive monitoring’, monitoring programs typically rely on fixed protocols that fail to capture the complex and dynamic natural world. New technologies offer this long sought flexibility, yet paradoxically risk our ability to detect trends by generating fragmented, high frequency data untethered to broader monitoring objectives. Here, we introduce ROAM [...]
Diversity comes at a cost: multifaceted diversity reduces plant community stability in peatlands
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Understanding how ecological stability relates to diversity is of crucial importance under global change. Greater biodiversity is expected to stabilize aggregate community properties through compensatory dynamics, as species fluctuate asynchronously and offset one another. Yet, diversity-stability relationships are not straightforward and can vary across and within ecosystems, particularly in [...]
Creating opportunities for coexistence to overcome the food–biodiversity challenge
Published: 2026-02-02
Subjects: Life Sciences
Coexistence with biodiversity in agricultural landscapes is a global vision by 2050. However, the co-occurrence of wildlife and human food production often results in conflicts which require resolution. Therefore, agroecological landscapes that emerge when sharing land ultimately require achieving human-nature coexistence. We conceptualize human-nature coexistence as an n-dimensional space [...]
Integrating evolutionary theory into a framework for the mechanistic evaluation of candidate anti-aging interventions
Published: 2026-01-30
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite decades of research into the molecular hallmarks of aging, geroscience lacks a unifying framework to guide the development of effective anti-aging interventions. Here, we integrate two leading evolutionary theories—the Disposable Soma Theory and Hyperfunction Theory—into a layered model of aging biology, the “Aging Onion”. In this framework, aging arises both from persistent activity of [...]