Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
The case for octopus sentience: a follow-up to Simone’s “Are octopuses sentient beings?”
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Recently, a paper published in a Brazilian malacology online journal argued against the existence of sentience in octopuses based on disputable arguments – the presence of cannibalistic behavior, absence of sociality and parental care, short lives, size and complexity of the nervous system and intelligence. This response discusses a different perspective on the issue of octopus sentience, [...]
Understanding niche conformance in fire salamander larvae: Insights from reciprocal transplant experiments
Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Life Sciences, Zoology
Amphibians are in particular vulnerable to (climatic) changes in their habitat as they are highly dependent on precipitation and temperature. The larval stage can be considered the most critical life stage in the ontogeny of most amphibians as predation is very high, and larvae are restricted to their natal aquatic habitat. The same applies for larvae of the fire salamander (Salamandra [...]
MUSEUMS SHOULD CURATE BEYOND THE NATURAL: DOMESTIC BREEDS OFFER UNIQUE INSIGHT INTO EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES & HUMAN CULTURE
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences
This short communication proposes that natural history museums should consider expanding their mission by intensively collecting and curating domesticated, hemerophilic, and genetically engineered animals, plants, and fungi to improve the study of evolutionary biology and anthropology, as well as mitigate against future climatic and economic challenges.
Longer heatwaves disrupt bacterial communities by decoupling resistance from recovery
Published: 2025-04-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Periodic heatwaves are increasing in duration, yet their ecological impacts on communities remain poorly understood. We experimentally tested how synthetic communities of soil Pseudomonas species respond to heatwaves of increasing duration. We used a resistance-recovery framework and growth rate-heat tolerance trade-offs to predict whether prolonged stress erodes community stability. Communities [...]
Computer Vision Models Offer Scalable Species Detection From Social Media Photographs
Published: 2025-04-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Social media platforms have emerged as a promising source of data for biodiversity monitoring, due to the vast amounts of user-generated visual content. However, the unstructured and noisy nature of social media data poses challenges for accurate species identification. Foundation vision models present an innovative methodology for identifying a large diversity of species from photographs, [...]
Linking Pattern to Process in Metacommunities: Challenges and Opportunities
Published: 2025-04-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
Ecological communities, and especially metacommunities, are complex and dynamic entities. Resolving the processes and mechanisms that shape these systems remains a central challenge in ecology. This challenge is compounded by the increasing entanglement of mechanisms, processes, and emergent patterns of biodiversity as scales of space, time, and biological organization expand. Here, we define and [...]
BOLDistilled: Comprehensive but compact DNA barcode reference libraries
Published: 2025-04-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Advances in DNA sequencing technology have stimulated the rapid uptake of protocols—such as eDNA analysis and metabarcoding—that infer the species composition of environmental samples from DNA sequences. DNA barcode reference libraries play a critical role in the interpretation of sequences gathered through such protocols, but many lack adequate taxonomic curation, include redundant records, do [...]
A user’s guide for understanding reptile and amphibian hydroregulation and climate change impacts
Published: 2025-04-18
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Human impacts on ecosystems have intensified variation in water variability for terrestrial life, thus challenging the maintenance of water balance, or hydroregulation. The accelerated development and accessibility of technologies and computational models over the past decade have enabled researchers to predict changes in animal hydroregulation and environmental water with greater spatial and [...]
Re-revisiting the Niche Concept
Published: 2025-04-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
The adaptive maintenance of phenotypic polymorphism
Published: 2025-04-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Phenotypic polymorphisms have fascinated evolutionary biologists since the field’s inception, providing easily observable and quantifiable variation amenable to both empirical and theoretical study. However, a clear method for developing alternative hypotheses for the adaptive processes by which multiple morphs are maintained remains elusive. Here we review hypotheses for the maintenance of [...]
The Subtlety of Lake Superior Ciscoe Recruitment Dynamics
Published: 2025-04-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Objective: Lake Superior whitefish [Salmonidae: Coregoninae] have undergone high annual variability in survival to age-1 over the last 50-years, particularly within the dominant ciscoe flock of Bloater Coregonus hoyi, Cisco C. artedi, and Kiyi C. Kiyi. This work sought to determine if this variance was associated with hydrometeorological attributes that have also varied considerably over the same [...]
Delineating freshwater fish biogeographic regions in the Philippine archipelago
Published: 2025-04-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The Philippines, a biodiversity hotspot with a complex geological history, presents an ideal setting to study freshwater fish biogeography in archipelagos. Despite its ecological significance, analyses of freshwater fish distribution patterns across the archipelago remain lacking. This study addresses this knowledge gap by delineating native freshwater fish biogeographic regions in the [...]
Function of duet coordination in a territorial socially monogamous bird
Published: 2025-04-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Duetting, a cooperative vocal behaviour performed by mated pairs, is a distinctive vocal behaviour among many species in specifically primates and birds. The exact features of duets that may make them a stronger territorial signal is still inconclusive. One hypothesis is that the precision of duet coordination can indicate the quality or dedication of a pair, and thus the degree of threat posed [...]
High spatial pair cohesion during and after breeding in a socially monogamous territorial passerine
Published: 2025-04-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Long-term social monogamy, a prevalent mating system in avian species, is often associated with increased cooperation and coordination as well as reduced sexual conflict. Although many studies have highlighted the benefits of long-term partnerships for individuals, there remains a lack of insight into how closely partners associate with one another behaviourally. To date, studies investigating [...]
Quantifying the correlation between variance components: an extension to the double-hierarchical generalised linear model
Published: 2025-04-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. The variational properties of biological systems are an increasing focus of current research, and statistical methods are required for drawing inferences about the processes that determine them. 2. Double-hierarchical generalised linear models (DHGLM) are ideally suited for studying variational properties since they provide a direct way of modelling the distribution of variances. 3. Although [...]