Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Early diversifications of angiosperms and their insect pollinators: Were they unlinked?
Published: 2021-11-18
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The present-day ubiquity of angiosperm-insect pollination has led to the hypothesis that these two groups coevolved early in their evolutionary history. However, recent fossil discoveries and fossil-calibrated molecular dating analyses challenge the notion that early diversifications of angiosperms and insects were inextricably linked. In this article we examine (i) the discrepancies between [...]
Quantifying research interests in 7,521 mammalian species with h-index: a case study
Published: 2021-11-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Taxonomic bias is a known issue within the field of biology, causing scientific knowledge to be unevenly distributed across species. However, a systematic quantification of the research interest that the scientific community has allocated to individual species remains a big data problem. Scalable approaches are needed to integrate biodiversity datasets and bibliometric methods across large [...]
Predicting the tripartite network of mosquito-borne disease
Published: 2021-11-17
Subjects: Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences
The potential for a pathogen to infect a host is mediated by traits of both the host and pathogen, as well as the complex interactions between them. Arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) require an intermediate vector, introducing an additional compatibility layer. Existing predictive models of host-virus networks rarely incorporate the unique aspects of vector transmission, instead treating [...]
The better, the choosier: a meta-analysis on inter-individual variation of male mate choice
Published: 2021-11-16
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Male mate choice occurs in several animal species, but we know little about the factors that influence the expression of this behaviour. Males vary in their capacity to acquire mates (i.e. male quality), which could be crucial to male mate choice expression but it is often overlooked. Using a meta-analytical approach, we explore inter-individual variation in the expression of male mate choice by [...]
Amazon fire regimes under climate change scenarios
Published: 2021-11-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Systems Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Fire is one of the most important disturbances of the earth-system, shaping the biodiversity of ecosystems and particularly forests. Climatic change and other anthropogenic drivers such as deforestation and land use change could produce abrupt changes in fire regimes, potentially triggering transition from forests to savannah or grasslands ecosystems with large accompanying biodiversity losses. [...]
The role of sexual isolation during rapid ecological divergence: evidence for a new dimension of isolation in Rhagoletis pomonella
Published: 2021-11-16
Subjects: Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
The pace of divergence and likelihood of complete speciation may depend how and when different types of reproductive barriers evolve. After initial reproductive barriers evolve, questions remain about how subsequently evolving barriers may facilitate additional divergence and potential speciation. We tested for the presence of sexual isolation (reduced mating between populations due to divergent [...]
Maternal and paternal age effects on male antler flies: a field experiment
Published: 2021-11-11
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
In many species, parental age at reproduction can influence offspring performance and lifespan, but the direction of these effects and the traits affected vary among studies. Data on parental age effects are still scarce in non-captive populations, especially insects, despite species such as fruit flies being models in laboratory-based aging research. We performed a biologically relevant [...]
Thermal processing reduces PFAS concentrations in blue food – A systematic review and meta-analysis
Published: 2021-11-09
Subjects: Environmental Health Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Toxicology
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are ubiquitous in the environment and often ingested with food. PFAS exposure in people can have detrimental health consequences. Therefore, reducing PFAS burdens in food items is of great importance to public health. Here, we investigated whether cooking reduces PFAS concentrations in animal-derived food products by synthesizing experimental studies. [...]
Unexpected global patterns in plant vulnerability to climate change
Published: 2021-11-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Understanding how species will respond to climate change is critically important for managing our ecosystems into the future. However, surprisingly little is known about the distribution of risk based on the actual thermal tolerances of species, especially plants. We used germination records from 776 species to provide a global map of plant warming risk – the difference between maximum [...]
Thermal plasticity in behavioural traits mediates mating and reproductive dynamics in an ectotherm
Published: 2021-11-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Global changes in temperature potentially influence sexual selection by restricting opportunities for activity. However, explicit tests of the behavioural mechanisms linking thermal variation to mating and reproductive performance are rare. We address this gap in a temperate lizard by combining social network analysis with molecular pedigree reconstruction in a large-scale thermal manipulation [...]
Potential survival of some, but not all, diversification methods
Published: 2021-11-06
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Models have long been used for understanding changing diversification patterns over time. The rediscovery that models with very different rates through time can fit a phylogeny equally well has led to great concern about the use of these models. We share and add to these concerns: even with time heterogeneous models without these issues, the distribution of the data means that estimates will be [...]
Regenerative food systems and the conservation of change
Published: 2021-11-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Life Sciences
In recent years, interest has increased in regenerative practices as a strategy for transforming food systems and solving major environmental problems such as biodiversity loss and climate change. However, debates persist regarding these practices and how they ought to be defined. This paper presents a framework for exploring the regenerative potential of food systems, focusing on how food [...]
Promoting scientific literacy in Evolution through citizen science
Published: 2021-11-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Evolutionary understanding is central to biology as a whole. It is also an essential prerequisite to understanding issues in everyday life, such as advances in medicine and global challenges like climate change. Yet, evolution is generally poorly understood by civil society and many misconceptions exist. Citizen science, which has been increasing in popularity as a means to gather new data and [...]
Inferring the history of hybridization: A case study in Iochrominae (Solanaceae)
Published: 2021-10-31
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
This paper tests multiple methods for detecting and localizing hybrids in the genus Iochroma (Solanaceae). We created a series of datasets varying in the amount of expected hybridization, and we included both natural hybrids and a positive control (an artificial hybrid). We found that adding hybrids to the dataset markedly increased discordance and decreased tree certainty, as predicted. [...]
Low statistical power and overestimated anthropogenic impacts, exacerbated by publication bias, dominate field studies in global change biology
Published: 2021-10-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Field studies are essential to reliably quantify ecological responses to global change because they are exposed to realistic climate manipulations. Yet such studies are limited in replicates, resulting in less power and, therefore, unreliable effect estimates. Further, while manipulative field experiments are assumed to be more powerful than non-manipulative observations, it has rarely been [...]