Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
The evolutionary relevance of social learning and transmission of behaviors in non-social arthropods
Published: 2021-08-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Research on social learning has centered around vertebrates, but evidence is accumulating that small-brained, non-social arthropods also learn from others. Social learning can lead to social inheritance when socially acquired behaviors are transmitted to subsequent generations. Here, we first highlight the complementarities between social and classical genetic inheritance, using oviposition site [...]
Simultaneous effect of habitat remnancy, exotic species and anthropogenic disturbance on orchid diversity and abundance
Published: 2021-08-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Orchids are potentially useful as ecological indicators because of their sensitivity to habitat fragmentation and anthropogenic disturbance. While many studies explore the effect of single factors on orchid diversity, few investigate how the extent, configuration and condition of surrounding habitat affect whole orchid communities. Here, we unravel the effect of biological invasions, [...]
Transgenerational effects of obesogenic diets in rodents: a meta-analysis
Published: 2021-08-03
Subjects: Biology, Diseases, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Nutrition
Obesity is a major health condition that affects millions worldwide. There is an increased interest in understanding the adverse outcomes associated with obesogenic diets. A multitude of studies have investigated the transgenerational impacts of maternal and parental obesogenic diets on subsequent generations of offspring, but results have largely been mixed. We conducted a systematic review [...]
Dissimilarity of species interaction networks: quantifying the effect of turnover and rewiring
Published: 2021-07-30
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Despite having established its usefulness in the last ten years, the decomposition of ecological networks in components allowing to measure their β-diversity retains some methodological ambiguities. Notably, how to quantify the relative effect of mechanisms tied to interaction rewiring vs. species turnover has been interpreted differently by different authors. In this contribution, I present [...]
Crumbling Island Keystones: Threat Diversity and Intensification on Islands Push Large Island Fruit Bats to the Brink
Published: 2021-07-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Large island fruit bats (LIFB), species of Pteropus, Acerodon, and related genera in the pteropodid subfamily Pteropodinae, are keystone species for island conservation in the Palaeotropics, playing critical roles as agents of dispersal and pollination of native island plant communities. This keystone role is crumbling because LIFB are collectively the most threatened group of bats in the world. [...]
Representation of global change drivers across biodiversity datasets
Published: 2021-07-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Global change has altered biodiversity and impacted ecosystem functions and services around the planet. Understanding the effects of anthropogenic drivers like human use and climate change on biodiversity change has become a key challenge for science and policy. However, our knowledge of biodiversity change is limited by the available data and their biases. Over land and sea, we test the [...]
Richard Lewontin (1929-2021): Evolutionary Biology’s Great Disrupter
Published: 2021-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
An appreciation of the career of the evolutionary biologist and activist Richard Lewontin (1929-2021)
Day and night camera trap video is effective for identifying wild Asian elephants
Published: 2021-07-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Comparative Psychology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Camera traps provide a virtual window into the natural world of wild animals, as they provide a noninvasive way to capture anatomical and behavioral information. Regular monitoring of wild populations through the collection of behavioral and demographic data is critical for the conservation of endangered species like the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus). Identifying individual elephants can [...]
Cryogenian glacial habitats as a plant terrestrialisation cradle – the origin of the anydrophytes and Zygnematophyceae split
Published: 2021-07-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
For tens of millions of years (Ma), the terrestrial habitats of Snowball Earth during the Cryogenian period (between 720 to 635 Ma before present – Neoproterozoic Era) were possibly dominated by global snow and ice cover up to the equatorial sublimative desert. The most recent time-calibrated phylogenies calibrated not only on plants but on a comprehensive set of eukaryotes indicate that within [...]
Roadkill in a time of pandemic: the analysis of wildlife-vehicle collisions reveals the differential impact of COVID-19 lockdown over mammal assemblages
Published: 2021-07-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Population Biology
Collisions with vehicles are a major anthropogenic cause of mortality for wildlife, with conservation and evolutionary implications. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries worldwide enforced lockdowns which importantly reduced traffic, and therefore had unprecedented consequences for global wildlife populations. We modeled how the two lockdown periods in spring and autumn 2020 influenced [...]
Quantifying the dynamics of nearly 100 years of dominance hierarchy research
Published: 2021-07-19
Subjects: Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Dominance hierarchies have been studied for almost 100 years. A science of science approach can help provide high-level insight into how the dynamics of dominance hierarchy research have shifted or been maintained over this long timescale. To summarize these general patterns, I extracted publication metadata using a Google Scholar search of "dominance hierarchy, resulting in over 26,000 [...]
The ecology of wealth inequality in animal societies
Published: 2021-07-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Individuals vary in their access to resources, social connections, and phenotypic traits, and a central goal of evolutionary biology is to understand how this variation arises and influences fitness. Parallel research on humans has focused on the causes and consequences of variation in material possessions, opportunity, and health. Central to both fields of study is that unequal distribution of [...]
What do we mean by multicellularity? The Evolutionary Transitions Framework provides answers
Published: 2021-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The meaning of the word ‘multicellularity’ appears to be unambiguous – a concept that can be grasped with common sense. On closer inspection, however, there is notable disparity in the recent literature regarding the usage of the term ‘multicellularity’, which can describe complex organisms, simple microbial colonies or even multi-species biofilms. In addition, while emerging research directions, [...]
Strategies for Managing Marine Disease
Published: 2021-07-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
The incidence of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) has increased in wildlife populations in recent years and is expected to continue to increase with global change. Marine diseases in particular are relatively understudied compared to terrestrial disease, but they can disrupt ecosystem resilience, cause economic loss, or threaten human health. While there are many existing tools to combat the [...]
Explaining preemptive acclimation by linking information to plant phenotype
Published: 2021-07-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
We review mechanisms for preemptive acclimation in plants and propose a conceptual model linking developmental and evolutionary ecology with the acquisition of information through sensing of cues and signals. The idea is that plants acquire much of the information in the environment not from individual cues and signals but instead from their joint multivariate properties such as correlations. If [...]