Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Candidozyma auris (Candida auris) as a harbinger of novel fungal pathogens
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Medical Microbiology, Medicine and Health Sciences, Microbiology, Pathogenic Microbiology
Mammals are protected from fungal pathogens by two evolutionary pillars: adaptive immunity and elevated body temperature. Anthropogenic climate change is eroding this thermal barrier, while a concurrent decline in human basal body temperature accelerates convergence from both directions. The emergence of Candidozyma auris (Candida auris), a thermotolerant, multidrug-resistant pathogen that arose [...]
Regional specificity without methodological fragmentation: a perspective on invasion-risk screening of Mediterranean freshwater fishes
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Regional ecological context is essential in invasion-risk screening but need not require development of a region-specific decision-support tool. The Mediterranean specificity of the Hellenic Risk Assessment (HeRA), developed for freshwater fishes in Greece, has been presented as a principal advantage over the globally employed Invasiveness Screening Kit (ISK) tools. In this Perspective, I show [...]
The intensity of sexual selection and the absence of assortative mating patterns in Prunella modularis (Aves: Passeriformes)
Published: 2026-08-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
When females and males prefer large mating partners, a size-assortative mating pattern can occur, and larger individuals tend to obtain more partners, thereby increasing the intensity of sexual selection. Considering this, we studied a population of dunnocks (Prunella modularis), a species with a variable mating system. We tested whether (A) assortativity (based on body size and/or condition) [...]
From environmental heterogeneity to stability: beta-diversity stabilises biomass across space
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how biodiversity influences ecosystem stability across heterogeneous landscapes is a central challenge in ecology. The spatial insurance hypothesis proposes that turnover in species composition stabilises ecosystem processes in heterogeneous environments by allowing species to occupy the habitats where they perform best. Yet, empirical evidence remains mixed, partly due to [...]
What Predictive Brains Inherit: An Evolutionary Account of Cognition
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Predictive and Bayesian frameworks explain how organisms weigh expectation against evidence, but not where the ingredients come from - what counts as a signal, what counts as a good outcome, which hypotheses and actions are available at all. We argue these are historical products, not formal assumptions, and hypothesise how they were built. Cognition is chained together by conditional necessity: [...]
Overcoming limitations in selection guidelines for state-of-nature metrics in corporate assessments
Published: 2026-08-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
The development and adoption of frameworks to help organisations understand, monitor, and disclose their biodiversity risks and impacts have accelerated due to Target 15 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Organisations are increasingly expected not only to measure their biodiversity pressures and responses, but also to demonstrate whether their actions lead to negative or [...]
Increase, decrease, or both: A systematic review of mosquito population response to floods
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Parasitic Diseases, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Virus Diseases
Floods are increasing in frequency and severity under the ongoing climate change and are widely reported to alter mosquito population dynamics. However, the direction, magnitude, and consistency of this effect across mosquito species and flood contexts remain poorly studied. This systematic review synthesizes empirical evidence on mosquito species population responses to disastrous flood events [...]
Five First Records from a Half-Century Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta) Communal Nesting Aggregation: Predation, Mortality, Nesting Phenology, and a Decade of Nest Protection
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
We describe a half-century communal nesting aggregation of the Wood Turtle (Glyptemys insculpta), a species of conservation concern, at a single restored prairie–savanna site along a tributary of the Namekagon River in northwest Wisconsin, USA, monitored since the 1970s and protected with successive structures since 2015, and we report five natural-history findings from the site that are, to our [...]
Flexible Resource Use but Consistent Parental Care across Populations in a Nocturnal Raptor
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Parental investment is often quantified by how much food offspring receive, yet parental behaviour throughout the breeding phase and the timing and composition of resource delivery may be equally important. We tested this by integrating behaviour, diet and activity rhythms in two populations of tawny owl (Strix aluco) in northern Europe. Parental behaviour followed conserved temporal patterns [...]
A Priori Prediction of Population Growth of Parnassius smintheus.
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
A priori testing of a model, i.e., predicting an event before it happens, is the gold standard for model validation. This model testing approach steps up ecological modeling beyond simply explaining the past to proactive predictive modeling by challenging the ability of theories to make accurate forecasts before new data are collected, a litmus test of how well we understand the systems we study. [...]
Maternal traits and ecological conditions shape mother-offspring association in a capital breeding mammal
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Maternal investment is central to life history theory and population dynamics. However, variation in maternal behaviors mediating investment, and the drivers and consequences of such variation, remain poorly understood. Using 30 years of data from 565 northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris), we evaluated the intrinsic and extrinsic factors influencing mother-offspring association, [...]
Linking movement to mortality: a framework for predicting anthropogenic mortality hotspots in wide-ranging animals
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Human activities and their impacts are a major source of mortality for wide-ranging animals, yet conservation efforts often remain reactive because it is difficult to predict where mortality is most likely to occur. Approaches to understand and reduce wildlife mortality typically rely on coarse-scale associations between mortality events and landscape features, limiting their ability to identify [...]
Robust and realistic power analysis for cost-effective monitoring of occupancy trends
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Structured monitoring programs play a key role in identifying whether a population is declining, stable, or increasing, and power analyses allow program planners to determine the number of sampling units required to reliably estimate a specified trend (e.g., 1% annual decline) with a specified error rate (e.g., α=0.20, or 80% power). Increasingly, monitoring programs track trends in site [...]
Leveraging participatory science data to detect and quantify elevational range shifts in birds
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
One of the primary expectations—and observed consequences—of persistent warming temperatures is range shifts to higher elevations. However, the ability to detect and attribute climate-driven range shifts has historically been limited to rare locations with sufficient time-series data, which are especially rare outside temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Leveraging data from [...]
Contextual evidence for categorising interactions and guiding their discovery
Published: 2026-08-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Ecological interactions shape community dynamics and stability, yet many go unrecorded. Link prediction methods attempt to tackle incomplete knowledge, but predictions are only conjectures, and validating them all in the field is neither feasible nor desirable. Furthermore, interactions differ in the action needed for their detection. Validation therefore must be guided by ecological and [...]