Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Inferring the dynamics of selective constraints across complex ontogenies
Published: 2025-09-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Most organisms undergo a series of complex phenotypic changes throughout their life cycles that allow them to meet the demands of different niches throughout ontogeny. Theory suggests the significant coordination required to undergo such ontogenetic transitions can impose evolutionary constraints on variation to developmental programs. This produces patterns known as developmental hourglasses, [...]
The Brightening Sky and the Bug's Advance: Unraveling the Drivers of Oxycarenus lavaterae Range Expansion
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Analyzing the Lime Seed Bug's (Oxycarenus lavaterae) European range expansion, optimized Maxent models and comprehensive occurrence data (2007-2025) reveal a swift northward and eastward spread, with a distinct "rapid expansion" phase starting in 2017. Key drivers include minimum and maximum temperatures, and importantly, downward shortwave radiation (DSR). Increased DSR, linked to [...]
Epi-eDNA: From Methylation Signal Detection to Functional Ecological Monitoring
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
Environmental DNA (eDNA) technology has revolutionized biomonitoring, primarily capturing the presence/absence of target taxa. Recent advances have revealed that eDNA also retains epigenetic signatures (epi-eDNA), particularly DNA methylation, which enable functional ecological insights. This review synthesizes three pivotal milestones: (1) Initial detection of methylation signals in eDNA, [...]
Ecosystem dynamics in dry heathlands: spatial and temporal effects of environmental drivers on the vegetation
Published: 2025-09-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
To understand and estimate the effects of environmental drivers on temperate dry heathland vegetation, pin-point cover data from 102 Danish sites sampled during a 16-year period was regressed onto selected environmental variables. The effects of nitrogen deposition, soil pH, soil C-N ratio, soil type, precipitation and grazing on the heathland vegetation was modelled in a spatio-temporal [...]
Fish biodiversity survey of small water bodies in the Nkhotakota District, Malawi.
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
We surveyed 6 small lakes and the lower reaches of the Kaombe River in Nkhotakota District of Malawi (in 2 seasons; rainy and dry hot seasons), primarily to determine if two species previously reported only from Lake Chilingali were still present in the area following the collapse of the Chilingali Dam in 2012 and failure to rediscover the species in 2016 and subsequently. We report that [...]
When and How to Use Restricted Spatial Regression to Separate Environmental Effects from Spatial Confounding
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Aim: To provide practical guidance for ecologists on when to use standard spatial generalized linear mixed models (SGLMMs) versus Restricted Spatial Regression (RSR). We reframe the debate by arguing the choice depends on whether the total effect or direct effect of covariates will be more transferable across space. Innovation: Our study's primary innovation is to introduce a causal framework to [...]
Spatial variation and individual specialization of stickleback diet in relation to trophic morphology
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
A population's dietary niche, including individual variation and specialization, shapes the scope and strength of its trophic linkages. Individual diet variation may emerge in response to spatial variation in the selective pressures that shape trophic morphologies, such as food availability or competition. Therefore, characterizing dietary niche variation and its link to morphological differences [...]
Project Psyche: Generating and utilising reference genomes for all Lepidoptera in Europe
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences
Project Psyche is a trans-national initiative to generate and study chromosome-level reference genomes of all ca. 11,000 described species of Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) found in Europe. The Project Psyche community encompasses diverse researchers, amateur lepidopterists, practitioners, and industry experts united by a common vision of the importance of genomics for Lepidoptera. [...]
Natural developmental temperatures of ectotherms: A systematic map and comparative analysis
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In ectothermic animals, physiological processes are highly sensitive to environmental temperatures. Developmental temperatures, in particular, have large and long-lasting impacts on ectotherm phenotypes. However, most phenotypic responses are studied in the laboratory, and may not accurately reflect ecological impacts in natural environments. In this study, we provide the first synthesis of [...]
In African savannas, are donor and trophic control of ungulate prey coupled by apparent competition?
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how donor (bottom-up) and trophic (top-down) modes of population control shape food web structure and dynamics has long been a major goal of ecology, yet consensus about mechanisms is lacking. Two prevalent patterns hint at generality in mechanisms that shape predator-prey communities. First, within communities, herbivore biomass declines and plant biomass increases in the presence [...]
Fossils for Future: the billion-dollar case for paleontology’s digital infrastructure
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Bioinformatics, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Arts and Humanities, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The digital revolution has transformed paleontology through the development of open-access, community-driven databases that underpin some of the most impactful research in biodiversity, climate change, and extinction dynamics. These systems safeguard high-effort, volunteered data and have revealed major macroevolutionary patterns, including mass extinctions. However, of 118 paleontological and [...]
Context dependency of phenotypic divergence and eco-evolutionary feedback: insight from a mesocosm experiment on moor frog tadpoles.
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Rapid environmental change is driving global biodiversity declines, challenging species to persist through genetic adaptation and phenotypic plasticity. These responses can also feed back onto ecosystems ecology, a process called eco-evolutionary feedbacks, potentially reshaping both selective environments and ecosystem properties. However, how phenotypic divergence and potential eco-evolutionary [...]
A new participatory conservation framework built on the rise of native plant gardening
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Global biodiversity strategies are ambitious on paper but fall short in practice. It is not strategy we lack, but the capacity to translate these plans into action on the ground. Akin to the community scientists that revolutionised biodiversity monitoring, we posit that community stewards, emerging from the rapidly growing native plant gardening movement, could scale up science-informed plant [...]
A concept using α-niche evolution within bacterial communities to direct β-niche evolution of focal species
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
The process of bacterial adaptation has a profound impact on human wellbeing and health, but our toolkit to modify evolution is limited. Here, we present a concept of how steering evolution can be achieved by integration of ecological and evolutionary approaches. The fundamental issue is how specific species bloom after community perturbance and subsequently evolve. We consider two kinds of [...]
"Homo informatio"
Published: 2025-09-10
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Did very “small-world” networks enhance the Darwinian fitness of primaeval Homo through exchanges of information that enabled exploration of resources beyond those exploitable at hand? An active inference suggestion is offered about the early evolution of human social behaviour. A phylogenetic split ~7.5 Ma (million years ago) separated paninan ancestors that were unlike today's chimpanzees, and [...]