Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Microbiotic particles in water and soil, water-soil microbiota coalescences, and antimicrobial resistance
Published: 2021-11-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology
Bacterial organisms like surfaces. Water and soil contain a multiplicity of particulated material where bacterial populations and communities might attach. Microbiotic particles refers to any type of small particles (less than 2 mm) where bacteria (and other microbes) might attach, resulting in medium- long-term colonization. In this work, the interactions of bacterial organisms with microbiotic [...]
Idea Paper: improving forecasts of community composition with lightweight biodiversity monitoring across ecological and anthropogenic disturbance gradients
Published: 2021-11-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Accurate and up-to-date biodiversity forecasts enable robust planning for environmental management and conservation of landscapes under a wide range of uses. Future predictions of the species composition of ecological communities complement more frequently reported species richness estimates to better characterize the different dimensions of biodiversity. The models that make community [...]
A review of chemical defense in harlequin toads (Bufonidae; Atelopus)
Published: 2021-11-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health
Toads of the genus Atelopus are chemically defended by a unique combination of endogenously synthesized cardiotoxins (bufadienolides) and neurotoxins which may be sequestered (guanidinium alkaloids). Investigation into Atelopus small-molecule chemical defenses has been primarily concerned with identifying and characterizing various forms of these toxins while largely overlooking their ecological [...]
Temporal patterns in prey size between sexes in a raptor with extreme size dimorphism: testing the intersexual competition hypothesis using web-sourced photographs
Published: 2021-11-28
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Zoology
In most vertebrates, males are larger than females. For raptors, sexual size dimorphism is reversed, with females being larger. Reversed sexual dimorphism (RSD) in raptors is strongly linked to diet, with species feeding on the most agile prey, for example bird-eating raptors, showing the greatest size differences between the sexes. Hypotheses for reversed sexual dimorphism (RSD) include the [...]
ROBITT: a tool for assessing the risk-of-bias in studies of temporal trends in ecology
Published: 2021-11-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
1. Aggregated species occurrence and abundance data from disparate sources are increasingly accessible to ecologists for the analysis of temporal trends in biodiversity. However, sampling biases relevant to any given research question are often poorly explored and infrequently reported; this has the potential to undermine statistical inference. In other disciplines, but particularly medicine, [...]
Impact of heat stress on the fitness outcomes of symbiotic infection in aphids: a meta-analysis
Published: 2021-11-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Evolution, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Microbiology
Beneficial microorganisms shape the evolutionary trajectories of their hosts, facilitating or constraining the colonization of new ecological niches. One convincing example entails the responses of insect-microbe associations to rising temperatures. Indeed, the insect resilience to stressful high temperatures depends on the genetic identity of the obligate symbiont and the presence of heat [...]
Spearing into the future: a global review of marine recreational spearfishing
Published: 2021-11-23
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Life Sciences
Spearfishing is practiced by a small fraction of younger recreational fishers and has received considerably less scientific attention than angling. This knowledge gap may negatively affect the ability for developing sustainable marine recreational fisheries. We address this through a global systematic review of the literature pertaining to marine spearfishing (both recreational and otherwise) and [...]
Notes on a tree: reframing the relevance of primate choruses, duets, and solo songs
Published: 2021-11-23
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Life Sciences, Zoology
The complexity of primates’ singing behavior has long gathered the attention of researchers interested in understanding the selective pressures underpinning the evolution of language. Among these pressures, a link between territoriality, pair-living, and singing displays has been suggested. Historically, singing primates have been found in a few taxa that are not closely related to each other, [...]
A rapidly expanding house of cards: the silent loss of cell physiology hampers marine biosciences
Published: 2021-11-22
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences
Perspective: An ongoing loss of expertise on the biochemistry and physiology of marine organisms hampers our understanding of biological mechanisms upon rapidly growing “-omics” approaches reply -ultimately affecting our ability to predict organismal responses to climate change.
Take only pictures, leave only… Cameras influence marmot vigilance but not perceptions of risk
Published: 2021-11-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Ecotourism promotes conservation efforts while also allowing for low impact observation of wildlife. Many ecotourists photograph wildlife and photography plays an important role in focusing the public’s attention on nature. Although photography is commonly believed to be a low impact activity, how the visual stimulus of a camera influences wildlife remains unknown. Since animals are known to fear [...]
Early diversifications of angiosperms and their insect pollinators: Were they unlinked?
Published: 2021-11-19
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The present-day ubiquity of angiosperm-insect pollination has led to the hypothesis that these two groups coevolved early in their evolutionary history. However, recent fossil discoveries and fossil-calibrated molecular dating analyses challenge the notion that early diversifications of angiosperms and insects were inextricably linked. In this article we examine (i) the discrepancies between [...]
Quantifying research interests in 7,521 mammalian species with h-index: a case study
Published: 2021-11-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Taxonomic bias is a known issue within the field of biology, causing scientific knowledge to be unevenly distributed across species. However, a systematic quantification of the research interest that the scientific community has allocated to individual species remains a big data problem. Scalable approaches are needed to integrate biodiversity datasets and bibliometric methods across large [...]
Predicting the tripartite network of mosquito-borne disease
Published: 2021-11-18
Subjects: Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences
The potential for a pathogen to infect a host is mediated by traits of both the host and pathogen, as well as the complex interactions between them. Arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) require an intermediate vector, introducing an additional compatibility layer. Existing predictive models of host-virus networks rarely incorporate the unique aspects of vector transmission, instead treating [...]
The better, the choosier: a meta-analysis on inter-individual variation of male mate choice
Published: 2021-11-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Male mate choice occurs in several animal species, but we know little about the factors that influence the expression of this behaviour. Males vary in their capacity to acquire mates (i.e. male quality), which could be crucial to male mate choice expression but it is often overlooked. Using a meta-analytical approach, we explore inter-individual variation in the expression of male mate choice by [...]
Amazon fire regimes under climate change scenarios
Published: 2021-11-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Systems Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Fire is one of the most important disturbances of the earth-system, shaping the biodiversity of ecosystems and particularly forests. Climatic change and other anthropogenic drivers such as deforestation and land use change could produce abrupt changes in fire regimes, potentially triggering transition from forests to savannah or grasslands ecosystems with large accompanying biodiversity losses. [...]