Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Ongoing collapse of avifauna in temperate oceanic islands close to the mainland in the Anthropocene
Published: 2024-07-31
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Oceanic island ecosystems are highly vulnerable to human activity. Furthermore, oceanic islands close to the mainland provide distinct perspectives on natural processes, including overseas dispersal from the mainland. However, the effects of overseas dispersal and human activity on insular community changes have not been empirically demonstrated. 2. To clarify the mechanisms driving changes in [...]
EcoState: Extending Ecopath with Ecosim to estimate biological parameters and process errors using RTMB and time-series data
Published: 2024-07-31
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mass-balance ecosystem models including Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) are widely used tools for analyzing aquatic ecosystems to support strategic ecosystem-based management. These models are typically developed by first tuning unknown parameters to achieve mass balance (termed “Ecopath”), then projecting dynamics over time (“Ecosim”) while sometimes tuning predator-prey vulnerability parameters to [...]
A review of professional ecological societies’ values, missions, and ethics
Published: 2024-07-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The rapid decline in Earth’s biodiversity poses significant threats to nature and human well-being. Human activities such as land use change, pollution, climate change, invasive species, and overexploitation drive this crisis, endangering millions of species and affecting critical habitats and ecosystems. This study investigates the role of professional ecological societies in addressing the [...]
Age, sex, and temperature shape within- and among-individual space use in black-capped chickadees
Published: 2024-07-27
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Historically, spatial ecology studies have focused on average movement patterns within animal groups; however, recent studies highlight the value of considering movement decisions both within- and among-individuals. Using a marked population of black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), we used the number of unique feeders an individual visits within our study area as a proxy for space use [...]
Sexual dimorphism of metabolism in vampire crabs (Geosesarma hagen) is temperature and size-dependent
Published: 2024-07-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology
El metabolismo es un vínculo clave entre la fisiología de un organismo y el medio ambiente. La plasticidad en las tasas metabólicas permite a los organismos responder y adaptarse al cambio ambiental. Comprender cómo cambia el metabolismo en respuesta a los aumentos de la temperatura ambiente y cómo estos cambios tendrán efectos diferenciales entre los individuos es un objetivo fundamental. [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of The Agulhas
Published: 2024-07-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Agulhas is a regional ecosystem subgroup (Level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Agulhas Bank and KwaZulu-Natal that extend along the South African eastern coastline. The extent of the Agulhas mangroves in 2023 is 23.0 km2, representing 0.02% of the global mangrove area. Mangroves in this province are limited to 31 estuaries [...]
Snakes (Erythrolamprus spp.) with a complex toxic diet show convergent yet highly heterogeneous voltage-gated sodium channel evolution
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Chemical defenses shape ecosystems by orchestrating interactions between species and promoting specialization on toxic prey. Many toxins exist in highly biodiverse tropical ecosystems, sometimes in the same prey, imposing challenges for studying toxin resistance and requiring the development of new models. Royal ground snakes (Erythrolamprus) play a significant but understudied role as predators [...]
Short-sighted evolution of virulence for invasive gut microbes: from hypothesis to tests.
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
Why microbes harm their hosts is a fundamental question in evolutionary biology with broad relevance to our understanding of infectious diseases. Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain this "evolution of virulence." In this perspective, we re-examine one of these hypotheses in the specific context of the human gut microbiome, namely short-sighted evolution. According to the [...]
Match or mismatch: Tokay geckos adjust their behaviour based on handler familiarity but according to the context
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Animals need to recognize different individuals, both con- and heterospecifics, to make appropriate decisions. In the wild, responses to familiar individuals may vary depending on the context, which can be beneficial. However, differing responses towards human experimenters can influence experimental outcomes. Such effects might be particularly overlooked in reptiles which are frequently viewed [...]
Does biogeographic history shape spatial patterns of intraspecific variation in personality, performance and morphology?
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Life Sciences
Addressing how individual variation within populations drives the evolution of biodiversity patterns is a major challenge in ecology and evolutionary biology. Historical biogeographic processes have had dramatic consequences on the structure of biodiversity. However, while the interplay between historical processes and genotypic diversity within populations has been widely investigated, the [...]
Deciphering probabilistic species interaction networks
Published: 2024-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Representing species interactions probabilistically (how likely are they to occur?) as opposed to deterministically (are they occurring?) conveys uncertainties in our knowledge of interactions and information on their variability. The sources of uncertainty captured by interaction probabilities depend on the method used to evaluate them: uncertainty of predictive models, subjective assessment of [...]
Temperature-dependent differences in male and female life history responses to a period of food limitation during development
Published: 2024-07-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
With climate change, animals face both rising temperatures and more variable food availability. Many species have evolved an adaptative response to historic variation in food availability: they grow faster after a period of diet restriction (“compensatory growth”). However, higher temperatures may reduce the capacity for compensatory growth in ectotherms because individuals require more resources [...]
Bimodal seasonal activity of moths and elevation, weather and land use as drivers of their diversity
Published: 2024-07-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Moths are an important part of terrestrial insect diversity and contribute substantially to ecosys-tem functioning. Yet, how their activity varies with the season and how different biotic and abiotic factors (elevation, weather, land use) are simultaneously linked to moth community characteristics are still poorly understood. We analysed a vast moth community dataset from Switzerland collected by [...]
Biodiversity research in India: a bibliometric overview
Published: 2024-07-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
As one of the ‘megadiverse’ countries, biodiversity research in India is not only important, specifically for India, but also for the world. To investigate the condition of biodiversity in the Indian academic literature, bibliometric analysis was employed. The Web of Science Core Collection provided data (2000–2023). Out of a preliminary set of 1090 publications, 223 were finalised with a focus [...]
Disentangling variational bias: the roles of development, mutation and selection
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The extraordinary diversity and adaptive fit of organisms to their environment depends fundamentally on the availability of variation. While many evolutionary studies assume that random mutations produce isotropic phenotypic variation, the distribution of variation available to natural selection is more restricted, as the distribution of phenotypic variation is affected by a range of factors in [...]