Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Cell-autonomous immunity and the endosymbiotic theory: Septins at the origin?
Published: 2026-08-28
Subjects: Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The origin of complex eukaryotic cells remains a long-standing mystery. Endosymbiosis gave rise to mitochondria and chloroplasts, the bacteria-derived organelles that underpin eukaryotic productivity. Early eukaryotes had to establish these partnerships while avoiding pathogens, using limited ancestral tools. Septins are cytoskeletal GTP-binding proteins best known for roles in cytokinesis, yet [...]
The Cohort Net Reproductive Rate: an empirically grounded approach to R0 for structured populations and epidemics
Published: 2026-08-27
Subjects: Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Population Biology
The net reproductive rate, or per-generation population growth rate R0, is a key concept for population and epidemic dynamics, because persistence versus extinction is often determined by the sign of R0−1. Because it is defined as generation-to-generation growth, it is hard to assess empirically for structured populations or epidemics where generations overlap, and is usually estimated by [...]
How many ways are there to be a phage?
Published: 2026-08-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Virology
The search for predictive rules for how microbiomes assemble and function rarely include their most abundant members: phages. Nearly a century of phage research has yielded few ecological principles for the impacts of phages within microbial communities – sequencing surveys resolve phage presence but not phage activity, while mechanistic studies of relatively few model phages provide insights [...]
The short-term effects of wildfire on heathland bird communities: a case study at Killarney National Park, Ireland
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fire is a key driver of ecosystem structure and function globally, yet climate and land-use change are driving increasingly variable wildfire patterns, with important consequences for biodiversity and ecological processes. Post-fire community dynamics are shaped by ecological, landscape and fire characteristics, but as these drivers change, understanding avian community-level responses is [...]
An Updated Checklist of the Amphibians of Bangladesh: Taxonomic Diversity, Distribution, and Conservation Status
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences
Bangladesh is situated at the confluence of the Indo-Himalayan and Indo-Burma biodiversity hot spots and is home to a rich but poorly known amphibian fauna. By synthesizing published literature, museum records, historical reports, online biodiversity databases, recent taxonomic revisions, newly described species, and verified iNaturalist observations, this study provides an updated [...]
Measure what the coarsening removes: a precondition for interpreting spatial-resolution comparisons in ecological models
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Ecological models increasingly use "scale-free" downscaled climate surfaces, assuming finer resolution predicts local response better. Even a comparison that varies resolution alone can fail to test it: over a small extent, coarsening barely changes the predictors. I provide a diagnostic detecting this before a model is fitted. Though the variance decomposition is classical, calibrating it [...]
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 [...]