Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Reframing marine host-microbe symbioses: from taxonomic inventories to functional convergence
Published: 2026-08-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
In October 2025, the Trends in Host-Microbe Symbioses Symposium at the University of Padova (Italy) brought together a global community of researchers, with the aim of taking stock of the current trajectory of marine host-microbiome research. Integrating perspectives from ecology, evolution, biogeochemistry, and biotechnology, the symposium documented a clear transition from descriptive surveys [...]
Alignment dynamics: how environmental restoration reshapes disease risk
Published: 2026-08-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ecological change can generate variable infectious disease outcomes even when it produces similar shifts in biodiversity, habitat structure, or pathogen hazard. Existing disease-ecology frameworks identify the components and pathways governing transmission, but less explicitly formalise how their relative timing and spatial organisation determine when transmission opportunities emerge. We argue [...]
Voluntary wheel use across animal taxa: motivation, enrichment, stereotypy and ethological interpretation
Published: 2026-08-14
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Exercise wheels are simple devices for recording animal movement, but they elicit surprisingly complex behaviours. In laboratory rodents, running wheels are key for studying voluntary exercise, circadian rhythms, motivation, energy balance, stress physiology and brain plasticity. Outside rodents, wheel-like devices have also been provided to rabbits, cats, squirrels, reptiles and invertebrates. [...]
How closed is “closed”? Ambiguity in British Columbia’s Closed Containment aquaculture regulations
Published: 2026-08-14
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Zoology
We examine disease-transmission risks to wild salmon associated with containment technologies proposed in 2025 under British Columbia’s transition away from open-net pen aquaculture. To ensure consistent terminology, and to avoid the mischaracterization of marine “semi-closed” flow-through systems as “closed containment,” we clarify categories of aquaculture production technologies and compare [...]
Plant sex chromosome evolution in the phylogenomic era
Published: 2026-08-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Plants harbor a tremendous diversity of sexual systems, including various forms of chromosomal sex determination that have arisen repeatedly across major clades, especially in angiosperms. The causes and consequences of sex chromosome evolution are far-reaching, with implications for sexual system, mating system, and life history evolution, genome architecture, and speciation, extinction, and [...]
Reproduction is more sensitive to warming than adult lifespan across invertebrates
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Studies estimating the effect of temperature on wild animal populations typically focus on survival as a proxy for population health. However, high and low temperatures can also negatively influence animal reproduction, and recent work suggests that the thermal sensitivity of reproduction is more important for population persistence that the thermal sensitivity of survival in some species groups. [...]
The life cycle of the tapeworm Dibothriocephalus latus in Switzerland: what we know, what we miss, and how it is sustained
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Dibothriocephalus latus is a broad fish tapeworm with a complex life cycle that requires three host stages - copepods, fish, and humans. Over the last 25 years, the prevalence of D. latus has noticeably declined in many parts of Europe, with the exception of the Alpine region. Recent studies have shown that D. latus is prevalent in fish from sub-alpine lakes, the second intermediate host, which [...]
Revisiting Taylor's law, rediscovering Smith's law: A dual framework for scaling heterogeneity
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Taylor's (1961) power law (TPL)—variance scales with mean density—originated in agricultural entomology but now spans the natural and social sciences and even the humanities. Cited over 8,000 times and featured in Nature for decades, its reach far exceeds its ecological origins. Yet TPL has been dormant in Nature for the past two decades, though it remains active in PNAS. Smith's (1938) law [...]
Lake Champlain fisheries and ecosystem in the context of the Laurentian Great Lakes: past research, current management issues, and future research priorities
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Lake Champlain is a large lake bordered by New York, Vermont, and Quebec. This bi-national, multi-jurisdictional lake shares many management issues and challenges with the much larger bi-national Laurentian Great Lakes, including a history of commercial fisheries, species declines and extirpations, sport fisheries supported by stocking, and invasion of non-native species. The bathymetric [...]
Ecological Patterns in Mammalian Vocal Frequencies: Evidence Across Body Sizes and Habitats
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Vocalisations in mammals are an important sensory modality that is used for various purposes in communication, courtship, territorial display, navigation, prey detection, predator avoidance, reproduction, and social coordination. These various call functions are differentiated from each other through certain properties. Call spectral properties are influenced by anatomical constraints, especially [...]
Chromosomal speciation through holocentric lenses
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Chromosomal rearrangements (CRs) can trigger speciation by acting as barriers to gene flow. Two main theoretical frameworks were developed on how they contribute to speciation: causing infertility in heterokaryotypes (hybrid dysfunction) or creating islands of divergence through recombination suppression. However, these theories were developed with monocentric chromosomes in mind. Species with [...]
A national checklist for monitoring Portugal’s pollinators (Anthophila, Syrphidae and Papilionoidea) under the EU Nature Restoration Regulation
Published: 2026-08-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Wild pollinators are declining across Europe, prompting new policy commitments. The EU Nature Restoration Regulation requires Member States to reverse pollinator decline and to monitor pollinator abundance and species richness. Effective implementation depends on robust national taxonomic baselines that define which species are present, where they occur and how they can be monitored [...]
Specimen preservation affects herbarium-derived leaf traits, reflectance spectra, and predictive models
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
• Herbaria are increasingly used as sources of functional trait data and reflectance spectra used in models for trait prediction and species classification. However, it is currently unknown how leaf preservation protocols may affect these data. • Using a factorial experimental design, we tested how alcohol preservation, drying intensity, and their interaction affected foliar traits (leaf mass per [...]
Daphniids avoid Utricularia on a horizontal plane
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Life Sciences
Besides animal predators, carnivorous plants, such as the littoral bladderwort Utricularia vulgaris, also strongly impact cladoceran communities by efficiently capturing passing planktonic animals, including small daphniids, in their bladder traps. Therefore, we hypothesized these animals should avoid direct contact with these carnivorous plants. We measured the distance Ceriodaphnia and [...]
GRACE Resurvey of Central European Grassland Vegetation to study the Impacts of Country-Level Landscape Dynamics on Biodiversity
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Life Sciences
Grasslands harbor high species diversity and are strongly influenced by local management and land-use histories. In countries of Central Europe, these ecosystems were severely impacted by different agricultural policies on both sides of the former Iron Curtain in the second half of the 20th century,, reshaping grassland extent and habitat quality. These land-use changes turned border regions into [...]