Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
The role of sexual isolation during rapid ecological divergence: evidence for a new dimension of isolation in Rhagoletis pomonella
Published: 2021-11-16
Subjects: Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
The pace of divergence and likelihood of complete speciation may depend how and when different types of reproductive barriers evolve. After initial reproductive barriers evolve, questions remain about how subsequently evolving barriers may facilitate additional divergence and potential speciation. We tested for the presence of sexual isolation (reduced mating between populations due to divergent [...]
Maternal and paternal age effects on male antler flies: a field experiment
Published: 2021-11-11
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
In many species, parental age at reproduction can influence offspring performance and lifespan, but the direction of these effects and the traits affected vary among studies. Data on parental age effects are still scarce in non-captive populations, especially insects, despite species such as fruit flies being models in laboratory-based aging research. We performed a biologically relevant [...]
Thermal processing reduces PFAS concentrations in blue food – A systematic review and meta-analysis
Published: 2021-11-10
Subjects: Environmental Health Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Toxicology
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are ubiquitous in the environment and often ingested with food. PFAS exposure in people can have detrimental health consequences. Therefore, reducing PFAS burdens in food items is of great importance to public health. Here, we investigated whether cooking reduces PFAS concentrations in animal-derived food products by synthesizing experimental studies. [...]
Unexpected global patterns in plant vulnerability to climate change
Published: 2021-11-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Understanding how species will respond to climate change is critically important for managing our ecosystems into the future. However, surprisingly little is known about the distribution of risk based on the actual thermal tolerances of species, especially plants. We used germination records from 776 species to provide a global map of plant warming risk – the difference between maximum [...]
Thermal plasticity in behavioural traits mediates mating and reproductive dynamics in an ectotherm
Published: 2021-11-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Global changes in temperature potentially influence sexual selection by restricting opportunities for activity. However, explicit tests of the behavioural mechanisms linking thermal variation to mating and reproductive performance are rare. We address this gap in a temperate lizard by combining social network analysis with molecular pedigree reconstruction in a large-scale thermal manipulation [...]
Potential survival of some, but not all, diversification methods
Published: 2021-11-06
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Models have long been used for understanding changing diversification patterns over time. The rediscovery that models with very different rates through time can fit a phylogeny equally well has led to great concern about the use of these models. We share and add to these concerns: even with time heterogeneous models without these issues, the distribution of the data means that estimates will be [...]
Regenerative food systems and the conservation of change
Published: 2021-11-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Life Sciences
In recent years, interest has increased in regenerative practices as a strategy for transforming food systems and solving major environmental problems such as biodiversity loss and climate change. However, debates persist regarding these practices and how they ought to be defined. This paper presents a framework for exploring the regenerative potential of food systems, focusing on how food [...]
Promoting scientific literacy in Evolution through citizen science
Published: 2021-11-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Evolutionary understanding is central to biology as a whole. It is also an essential prerequisite to understanding issues in everyday life, such as advances in medicine and global challenges like climate change. Yet, evolution is generally poorly understood by civil society and many misconceptions exist. Citizen science, which has been increasing in popularity as a means to gather new data and [...]
Inferring the history of hybridization: A case study in Iochrominae (Solanaceae)
Published: 2021-10-31
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
This paper tests multiple methods for detecting and localizing hybrids in the genus Iochroma (Solanaceae). We created a series of datasets varying in the amount of expected hybridization, and we included both natural hybrids and a positive control (an artificial hybrid). We found that adding hybrids to the dataset markedly increased discordance and decreased tree certainty, as predicted. [...]
Low statistical power and overestimated anthropogenic impacts, exacerbated by publication bias, dominate field studies in global change biology
Published: 2021-10-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Field studies are essential to reliably quantify ecological responses to global change because they are exposed to realistic climate manipulations. Yet such studies are limited in replicates, resulting in less power and, therefore, unreliable effect estimates. Further, while manipulative field experiments are assumed to be more powerful than non-manipulative observations, it has rarely been [...]
A protocol for reproducible functional diversity analyses
Published: 2021-10-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The widespread use of species traits to infer community assembly mechanisms or to link species to ecosystem functions has led to an exponential increase in functional diversity analyses, with >10,000 papers published in 2010–2019, and >1,500 papers only in 2020. This interest is reflected in the development of a multitude of theoretical and methodological frameworks for calculating [...]
Data rescue: saving environmental data from extinction
Published: 2021-10-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Historical and long-term environmental datasets are imperative to understanding how natural systems respond to our changing world. Although immensely valuable, these data are at risk of being lost unless actively curated and archived on data repositories. The practice of data rescue, which we define as identifying, preserving, and sharing valuable data and associated metadata at risk of loss, is [...]
Mexican agricultural frontier communities differ in forest dynamics with consequences for conservation and restoration
Published: 2021-10-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Forest regrowth is key to achieve restoration commitments, but a general lack of understanding when it occurs and how long secondary forests persist, hampers effective upscaling. We quantified spatiotemporal forest dynamics in a recently colonized agricultural frontier in southern Mexico, and tested how temporal variation in climate, and cross-community variation in land ownership, land quality [...]
Mobbing in animals: a thorough review and proposed future directions
Published: 2021-10-26
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Communication, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Mobbing is an important anti-predator behavior where prey harass and attack a predator to lower the immediate and long-term risk posed by predators, warn others, and communicate about the predator’s threat. While this behavior has been of interest to humans since antiquity, and aspects of it have been well researched for the past 50 years, we still know little about its ecology and the [...]
A force competition of predator on urban ecosystem
Published: 2021-10-25
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Definitely the fact, is an undeniable impact of habitat change and fragmentation in the urban ecosystem take effect to species loss causes population decline into local extinction. The results that emerged from habitat selection in ecology in this case study may suggest possible opportunistic of population turnover are caused by behaviour adaptive in the life-history of predators. And provides [...]