Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Speciation in ants: Unlocking ant diversity to study speciation (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)
Published: 2025-04-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ants are among the most abundant terrestrial animals and play key roles in ecosystems across the globe. Their taxonomic and ecological diversity makes them a prime taxon for contributing to our understanding of the patterns and processes of speciation.However, studies often do not explicitly link their results to the broader framework of speciation and reproductive isolation. Here we combine [...]
Deep-learning technology provides insights into the morphological evolution of birds
Published: 2025-04-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Computational Engineering, Evolution, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
The evolution of biological morphology is critical for understanding the diversity of the natural world, yet traditional analyses often involve subjective biases in the selection and coding of morphological traits. This study employs deep learning techniques, utilizing a pretrained ResNet34 model capable of recognizing over 10,000 bird species, to explore avian morphological evolution. We [...]
Plant genomic variation and its implications for proposed EU NGT legislation
Published: 2025-04-09
Subjects: Biotechnology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Plant Breeding and Genetics Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
The European Commission proposal for New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) of July 2023 specifies that NGT1 plants, which are considered equivalent to conventional plants, may differ from the recipient or parental plant by no more than 20 insertions, which cannot be longer than 20 bp; deletions can be of any size and number. Here, we examine the proposed 20/20 NGT1 limit against the background of the [...]
The Missing Environmental Impacts in Invasive Species Cost Assessments –Insights from an InvaCost-based regional review
Published: 2025-04-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Accounting for the costs incurred due to biological invasions is important for informing invasive species management policies, and understanding and mitigating future losses. InvaCost, a living review and massive database of cost estimates, is a valuable open science resource that can support informed policy and management of invasive species and has since been the basis of many regional and [...]
The molecular evolutionary basis of species formation revisited
Published: 2025-04-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
How do new species arise? This is among the most fundamental questions in evolutionary biology. The first genetic model for how reproductive barriers leads to the origin of new species was proposed nearly 90 years ago. However, empirical evidence for the genetic mechanisms that cause reproductive barriers took many decades to accumulate. In 2010, Presgraves presented a comprehensive review of the [...]
Scaling animal impacts on dispersal and structure through space and time.
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Life Sciences
Scaling theory allows us to predict animal impacts on seed distribution, zoogeochemistry, pathogen movement, and vegetation structure over space and time. Here we have both reviewed this literature and suggested future directions to scale such work over space and time and apply it to such disparate fields as ecosystem ecology, paleontology and remote sensing. This chapter is accepted in the [...]
Dynamic pollinator networks maintain pollination efficiency during mast flowering in an insect-pollinated tree
Published: 2025-04-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mast seeding, the synchronous and highly variable reproduction across years, is common among perennial plants, enhancing reproductive success through predator satiation and improved pollination. Animal-pollinated species generally show lower interannual variability in seed production then wind-pollinated plants, often explained by pollinator satiation reducing selection for masting. However, [...]
Functional traits drive the competitive assembly of ant communities and impact colony performance in competition mesocosms
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Studies along broad spatial and habitat gradients evidence that organisms’ traits can influence community assembly through their impact on dispersal and environmental filtering. However, the role of traits in structuring local faunal communities within habitats remains poorly understood. In particular, the often-assumed role of traits in affecting the outcome of competition among animal species [...]
Shifts in phenology and species ranges restructure the flowering season across North America
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
Global change is altering the phenology and geographic ranges of flowering species, with potentially profound consequences for the timing and composition of floral resources and the seasonal structure of ecological communities. However, shifts in flowering phenology and species distributions have historically been studied in isolation due to disciplinary silos and limited data, leaving critical [...]
AedesTraits: A global database of temperature–dependent trait responses in Aedes mosquitoes
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Invasive Aedes mosquitoes are major vectors of arboviral diseases such as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, posing an increasing threat to global public health. Their recent geographic expansion calls for predictive models to simulate population dynamics and transmission risk. Temperature is a key driver in these models, influencing traits that affect vector competence. While data on [...]
IQ-TREE 3: Phylogenomic Inference Software using Complex Evolutionary Models
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
IQ-TREE (http://www.iqtree.org) is a widely used open-source software tool for efficiently inferring phylogenetic trees under maximum likelihood. Here, we present IQ-TREE version 3, the third major release of the software. IQ-TREE 3 significantly extends version 2 with new features, including mixture models as an alternative to partitioned models, gene and site concordance factors to quantify [...]
Understanding different types of repeatability and intra-class correlation for an analysis of biological variation
Published: 2025-04-05
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Repeatability (more generally known as intraclass correlation) represents an important quantity of interest in many scientific fields. It represents a metric for summarizing variance decomposition to identify sources of variation in an outcome of interest (e.g. organismal traits). The estimation of variance components is often achieved through linear mixed-effect models or their extension, [...]
The effect of group size on ectoparasite load and physiological markers of health in a communally-roosting bird
Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Group living in animals can provide individuals with many fitness benefits, but also increases their exposure to parasites. However, the relationship between group size and parasite load both across and within species is highly variable, potentially due to selection acting on adaptations to reduce infection risks and costs, as well as species-specific variation in the type and frequency of social [...]
Weaning age and supersuckling in Galápagos Sea Lions (Zalophus wollebaeki): Maternal, offspring and environmental drivers of life-history strategies
Published: 2025-04-03
Subjects: Life Sciences
Weaning marks a critical life-history transition in mammals, shaped by maternal investment strategies, offspring condition, and environmental constraints. In Galápagos sea lions (Zalophus wollebaeki), weaning age is highly variable, with some individuals continuing to suckle into adulthood (supersucklers). Using 20 years of mark-recapture data from 1890 individuals, we applied multi-state [...]
Variability, drivers, and utility of genetic diversity-area relationships in terrestrial vertebrates
Published: 2025-04-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Maintaining genetic diversity within and among populations is critical for conservation and a prominent goal of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. However, direct estimates of genetic diversity are unavailable for most species, and time and resources are insufficient to fill these substantial data gaps and meet conservation target timelines. Robust, proxy-based predictions of [...]