Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Colorful birds face heightened extinction risk around the world
Published: 2025-06-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Ornithology
Many of the functional traits that mediate extinction risk across the tree life relate indirectly to a species’ ability to persist in a changing world. Yet, there are certain traits such as coloration that directly affect human interactions with wildlife. Here, we use an existing dataset of color metrics for 4334 passerine bird species combined with global functional trait data to determine [...]
The interplay between ecological networks drives host-plasmid community dynamics
Published: 2025-06-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Plasmids can accelerate host adaptation through horizontal gene transfer and are key members of microbial communities. Plasmid infection dynamics are potentially affected by the interplay between the structures of host-plasmid and plasmid-plasmid interactions. However, how the structures of these networks jointly affect plasmid transmission and community dynamics remains unstudied. We used an [...]
Delayed Reproduction as a Driver of Longevity
Published: 2025-06-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding the evolutionary forces that shape aging is central to both biology and medicine. While classic theories—such as Medawar’s mutation accumulation, Williams’ antagonistic pleiotropy, and Kirkwood’s disposable soma—have provided foundational insights, the population-level consequences of reproductive timing remain underexplored. Here, I propose that delayed reproduction may intensify [...]
Subterranean environments contribute to three-quarters of classified ecosystem services
Published: 2025-06-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
Beneath the Earth’s surface lies a network of interconnected caves, voids, and systems of fissures forming in rocks of sedimentary, igneous, or metamorphic origin. Though largely inaccessible to humans, this hidden realm supports and regulates services critical to ecological health and human well-being. Subterranean ecosystems are integral to major biogeochemical cycles, sustain diverse surface [...]
Withdrawn: Which phenotypic traits are under selection under warm, dry climates in black spruce?
Published: 2025-06-06
Subjects: Life Sciences
• Trees are increasingly at risk of maladaptation to their environment as climates change rapidly world-wide. Although adaptive evolution by natural selection is a key mechanism by which populations and species can avoid extinction in changing environments, we have limited information regarding the phenotypic traits under selection under warm and dry environments. We answer the following research [...]
Vaccination and immigration rates influence raccoon rabies elimination and recolonization in simulated urban-suburban landscapes
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
The raccoon variant of the rabies virus (RRV) is managed in the eastern United States and Canada via distribution of oral rabies vaccine (ORV) baits. The goal of ORV distribution is to reach seroprevalence rates (an index of population immunity) of at least 60%, the threshold thought to eliminate RRV. Seroprevalence rates in urban areas rarely reach target levels, predictably leading to rabies [...]
Relative High Fitness and Genome-wide Diversity May Facilitate Plastic and Active Foragers' Diversification
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Explaining the variation in diversification rates across the Tree of Life is an important challenge for evolutionary biologists. Growing evidence suggests that key innovations or historical contingency give rise to high diversification rates, but the genetic mechanisms through which this process may occur remain poorly investigated. Based on fitness landscapes, a high diversification is [...]
Seabird range contraction and dispersal under climate change
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Many marine ectotherms have historically adapted to local climate change by evolving smaller body sizes, reducing their energy demands in warmer waters but limiting their dispersal and speciation rate. Whether endothermic marine species respond similarly remains unclear, as temperature minimally affects their size diversity, and the drivers of their dispersal and speciation are poorly understood. [...]
Orphan and de novo Genes in Fungi and Animals: Identification, Origins and Functions
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Genes that don't have identifiable homologs in other species have been an intriguing and interesting topic of research for many years. These so-called orphan genes were first studied in yeast and since then, they have been found in many other species. This has fostered a whole field of research aiming at tracing back their evolutionary origin and functional significance. Orphan genes represent an [...]
Spatial and environmental influences on the assembly of silk microbiomes in a social spider
Published: 2025-06-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences
In nesting animals, the built environment can play an important role in host-associated microbiome assembly. However, the sources and processes structuring the resulting microbiome remain underexplored. In the social spider Stegodyphus dumicola, philopatric sisters collectively build and maintain a silken nest, capture prey, and exhibit alloparental care. We used S. dumicola as a test system to [...]
A framework for modelling thermal load sensitivity across life
Published: 2025-06-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences
Forecasts of vulnerability to climate warming require an integrative understanding of how species are exposed to, are damaged by, and recover from thermal stress in natural environments. The sensitivity of species to temperature depends on the frequency, duration, and magnitude of thermal stress. Thus, there is a generally recognised need to move beyond physiological metrics based solely on [...]
Pleistocene origins of cultural and linguistic diversification: how Homo sapiens and Neanderthals differed
Published: 2025-05-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
It is now widely assumed that Neanderthals possessed a human language-like communication system. What is yet unclear is how different this was from ours. Here we ask whether the communication system of Neanderthals shared a key feature of human languages: ergodicity. Ergodicity allows linguistic evolution to continue for purposes of social differentiation without changing the species-wide [...]
Gendered male and high-income country authors dominate publication at a One Health research organization
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences, Publishing, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Authorship on academic publications carries substantial weight for researchers in science fields. One’s position in a list of authors is typically used to signal information about author contributions and status, with the first and last authorship positions regarded as the most prestigious and important for career advancement. Therefore, any inequities that exist in the allocation of publication [...]
Herbarium specimens reveal regional patterns of tallgrass prairie invasion and changing species abundance across 130 years
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
The spread of non-native species is an acute threat to global biodiversity. However, a lack of long-term, spatially widespread occurrence data has prevented investigation of how multi-species invasions affect native assemblages. We harnessed more than 65,000 digitized herbarium specimens across 522 species to study how relative abundances of native and non-native species have changed since the [...]
Social plasticity across contexts in bobwhite quail
Published: 2025-05-28
Subjects: Life Sciences
An animal’s social network centrality has been linked to social benefits. However, the inverse effect of providing benefits to conspecifics on one’s centrality has received less attention. We investigated effects of foraging success, and accompanying food access provided to others, on an individual’s relationships in multiple social contexts using three captive groups of bobwhite quail (Colinus [...]