Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Evaluating top-down, bottom-up, and environmental drivers of pelagic food web dynamics along an estuarine gradient
Published: 2022-12-15
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Identification of the key biotic and abiotic drivers within food webs is important for understanding species abundance changes in ecosystems, particularly across ecotones where there may be strong variation in interaction strengths. Using structural equation models and four decades of integrated data from the San Francisco Estuary, we investigated the relative effects of top-down, bottom-up, and [...]
An Annotated Checklist of Lichens of the Opal Creek Wilderness and Adjacent Areas: a Pre-Fire Baseline
Published: 2022-12-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
In 2020 the Beachie Creek Fire burned a large area of forest in the northern Oregon Cascade Range including public and private land and much of the Opal Creek Wilderness. We compiled a baseline data set from various sources of the lichens known to occur before the fire within this area. These data are presented as an annotated species checklist documenting two hundred and eighty species. Euopsis [...]
Habitat destruction threatens jaguars in a mixed land use region of eastern Bolivia
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Large carnivores such as the jaguar (Panthera onca) are particularly susceptible to population decline and local extinction as a result of habitat loss. Here, we report on the long-term monitoring of a local jaguar population in a mixed land use area in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia from March 2017 to December 2019. We recorded 15 jaguar individuals and four reproduction events (five offspring [...]
Exploratory personality is independent of telomere dynamics in a wild bird population
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Numerous studies have demonstrated that individuals within a species will consistently vary between one another in behavioural traits. A prominent adaptive explanation for such ‘animal personalities’ relates to an individual’s intrinsic state driving and/or being driven by behaviour. Telomeres – the protective caps at the end of chromosomes which exist in most organisms – have been proposed as a [...]
Advances in the reconstruction of the Spider Tree of Life: a roadmap for spider systematics and comparative studies
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
In the last decade and a half, advances in genetic sequencing technologies have revolutionized systematics, transforming the field as studying morphological characters; a few genetic markers have given way to genomic data sets in the phylogenomic era. A plethora of molecular phylogenetic studies on many taxonomic groups have come about, converging on, or refuting prevailing morphology or [...]
A framework for improving the reproducibility of data extraction for meta-analysis
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Psychology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Extracting data from studies is the norm in meta-analyses, enabling researchers to generate effect sizes when raw data are otherwise not available. While there has been a general push for increased reproducibility in meta-analysis, the transparency and reproducibility of the data extraction phase is still lagging behind. Unfortunately, there is little guidance of how to make this process more [...]
Zooplankton as a model to study the effects of anthropogenic sounds on aquatic ecosystems
Published: 2022-12-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
There is a growing interest in the impact of acoustic pollution on aquatic ecosystems. Currently, research has primarily focused on hearing species, particularly fishes and mammals. However, species from lower trophic levels, including many invertebrates, are less studied despite their ecological significance. Among these taxa, studies examining the effects of sound on holozooplankton are [...]
Co-crediting system for carbon and biodiversity
Published: 2022-12-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Carbon crediting and land offsets for biodiversity protection are implemented to tackle the challenges of increasing greenhouse gas emissions and loss of global biodiversity, but these two mechanisms are not optimal when considered separately. Focusing solely on carbon capture – the primary goal of most carbon-focused offsetting commitments – often results in the establishment of non-native, [...]
Offspring sex ratio increases with male reproductive success in the polygynous southern elephant seals
Published: 2022-12-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
In polygynous species, most dominant males sire a disproportionate number of offspring and dominance rank is assumed to be age dependent. Yet, extreme inter-male competition and high early male mortality prevent most males from reaching a social status that could guaranty a high reproductive success. Alternative reproductive tactics may have evolved to maximize male reproductive success despite a [...]
Imagining Kant’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge: Philosophy and Education in Microbiology
Published: 2022-12-10
Subjects: Education, Life Sciences
In the field of observational and experimental natural sciences (as is the case for microbiology), recent decades have been overinfluenced by overwhelming technological advances, and the space of abstraction has been frequently disdained. However, the predictable future of biological sciences should necessarily recover the synthetic dimension of “natural philosophy”. We should understand the [...]
Comprehensive biodiversity survey of Wategora Reserve and Everley Park along Duck River, western Sydney
Published: 2022-12-09
Subjects: Life Sciences
Although much of suburban Sydney is heavily urbanised, there are also many pockets of remnant vegetation scattered throughout the region, even in the most built-up areas. From 2020-2022 I conducted a comprehensive biodiversity survey of Wategora Reserve, and the riparian vegetation adjacent to Everley Park directly south of the reserve, a small fragment of remnant bushland on the western bank of [...]
Power and limitations of the mutations-area relationship to assess within-species genetic diversity targets for post-2020 Sustainable Development Goals
Published: 2022-12-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
To evaluate the United Nation’s preliminary post-2020 sustainable goals on protecting high levels of genetic diversity per species, Exposito-Alonso et al. (2022) proposed a new framework to predict a species’ loss of genetic diversity given its loss of habitat area. This method, called the mutations-area relationship (MAR), is analogous to the species-area relationship (SAR), often used to assess [...]
Parasites during early life mediate the strength of phenotypic selection on sexual traits.
Published: 2022-12-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Sexually selected phenotypes are key to understanding population and eco-evolutionary dynamics since the expression of these traits is tightly linked to reproduction and population viability. Parasites are major agents of selection that alter both phenotypic expression and fitness. However, the carry-over effects of parasites in early life in selection on phenotypes expressed later in life are [...]
Boldness and physiological variation in round goby populations along their Baltic Sea invasion front
Published: 2022-12-07
Subjects: Life Sciences
The round goby (Neogobius melanostomus) is a fish native to the Ponto-Caspian region that is highly invasive through freshwater and brackish habitats in northern Europe and North America. Individual behavioural variation appears to be an important factor in their spread, for example a round goby’s personality traits can influence their dispersal tendency, which may also produce variation in the [...]
Quantifying between-individual variation using high-throughput phenotyping of behavioural traits in the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster)
Published: 2022-12-06
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Behavioural phenotyping is often time and labour-intensive, which can come at a cost to sample size and statistical precision. This is particularly a concern given that behaviours are often highly variable within and between individuals, so naturally requires a larger sample size. Drosophila melanogaster is a common model system in many research fields, and behavioural observations are frequently [...]