Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Life Sciences
Potential effects of habitat fragmentation on wild animal welfare
Published: 2020-06-18
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
The fragmentation of habitat has occurred throughout the history of life on Earth, but has been accelerated and magnified in scale over the past few centuries as a result of human industrial development. Habitat fragmentation affects the welfare of some wild animals directly, through the often violent processes that bring about fragmentation and by reducing the distance between them and the [...]
Do the ages of parents or helpers affect offspring fitness in a cooperatively breeding bird?
Published: 2020-06-16
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Age-related changes in either the phenotypes or genotypes of care-givers can impact juvenile performance. However, rarely in wild populations have germline and non-germline transgenerational effects of ageing been separately quantified. In cooperatively breeding animals, in addition to parental ages, the age of ‘helpers’ attending the nest may also impact juvenile performance. Using a wild [...]
Animal size and seawater temperature, but not pH, influence a repeatable startle response behaviour in a wide-ranging marine mollusc
Published: 2020-06-16
Subjects: Life Sciences, Marine Biology
Startle response behaviours are important in predator avoidance and escape for a wide array of animals. For many marine invertebrates, however, startle response behaviours are understudied, and the effects of global change stressors on these responses are unknown. We exposed two size classes of blue mussels (Mytilus edulis × trossulus) to different combinations of temperature (15 and 19 °C) and [...]
Phylogeny can Inform Animal Model Development for Both Inherited and Induced Conditions: Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD)
Published: 2020-06-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The use of animal models in research on human and veterinary diseases and disorders is retracting, though it is likely to remain critical for decades. In light of increasing regulation and expectations of judicious use of animal subjects, we examine the idea that the use of animal models can be guided by phylogenetic relationships and modern evolutionary and cladistic analyses. Given that [...]
Potential long-distance dispersal of freshwater diatoms adhering to waterfowl plumage
Published: 2020-06-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Waterfowl are potential long-distance dispersal vectors for aquatic microbes such as diatoms, but supporting empirical data are scarce, especially concerning external transport on feathers. 2. We conducted an experiment designed to partially emulate diatom dispersal via adherence to waterfowl, and to evaluate the effects of relative humidity (RH) and exposure time on viability. We dipped [...]
Desert Locust in India: The 2020 invasion and associated risks
Published: 2020-06-01
Subjects: Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Animal Sciences, Entomology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning, Zoology
Wind direction, often used in forecasting locust migration, indicates a non-zero probability of desert locust invasion in eastern Indian states. Apart from present controlling measures, we are additionally suggesting to be cautious about the eggs of locust as the rainfall associated with Super Cyclone Amphan has created a favorable breeding ground for the gregarious locust. Also reverse migration [...]
SYSTEMATICS OF CALANDRINIA PILOSIUSCULA DC A.K.A. CALANDRINIA COMPRESSA SCHRAD. EX DC (MONTIACEAE–MONTIOIDEAE)
Published: 2020-05-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences
Calandrinia compressa Schrad. ex DC (Prodr. 3: 359. 1828) is the name currently widely applied to a polymorphic annual species of Calandrinia sect. Calandrinia endemic to the Chilean Floristic Region. A total of ten validly published heterotypic names plus six horticultural designations (and orthographic variants thereof) have been considered at some point as taxonomically the same as C. [...]
A guide to using the Internet to monitor and quantify the wildlife trade
Published: 2020-05-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
The unrivalled growth in e-commerce of animals and plants presents an unprecedented opportunity to monitor wildlife trade to inform conservation, biosecurity, and law enforcement. Using the Internet to quantify the scale of the wildlife trade (volume, frequency) is a relatively recent and rapidly developing approach, which currently lacks an accessible framework for locating relevant websites and [...]
Local landscape position impacts demographic rates in a widespread North American steppe bunchgrass
Published: 2020-05-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
[this article now published at Ecosphere: https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.3351] Understanding the environmental drivers of demographic rates and population dynamics over space and time is critical for anticipating how species will respond to climate change. While the influence of temporal environmental variation and large environmental gradients are well recognized, less is known about how local [...]
Crowdsourcing global perspectives in ecology using social media
Published: 2020-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Transparent, open, and reproducible research is still far from routine, and the full potential of open science has not yet been realized. Crowdsourcing––defined as the usage of a flexible open call to a heterogeneous group of individuals to recruit volunteers for a task ––is an emerging scientific model that encourages larger and more outwardly transparent collaborations. While crowdsourcing, [...]
Fieldwork in landscape ecology
Published: 2020-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Fieldwork has played a critical role in the development of landscape ecology, and it remains essential for addressing contemporary challenges such as understanding the landscape ecology of global change. Advances in technology have expanded the scope of fieldwork to include the deployment of drones and other sensors, and in recent years, researchers have expressed concerns that traditional [...]
Small-scale farming in drylands: New models for resilient practices of millet and sorghum cultivation
Published: 2020-05-11
Subjects: Agriculture, Life Sciences, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Finger millet, pearl millet and sorghum are amongst the most important drought-tolerant crops worldwide. They constitute primary staple crops in drylands, where their production is known to date back over 5000 years ago. Compared to other crops, millets and sorghum have received less attention until very recently, and their production has been progressively reduced in the last 50 years. Here, we [...]
Associations between habitat quality and body size in the Carpathian land snail Vestia turgida: species distribution model selection and assessment of performance.
Published: 2020-05-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Associations between habitat quality and body size in the Carpathian land snail Vestia turgida: species distribution model selection and assessment of performance. Tytar V., Baidashnikov O. – Species distribution models (SDMs) are generally thought to be good indicators of habitat suitability, and thus of species’ performance, consequently SDMs can be validated by checking whether the areas [...]
Rapid-warming tolerance correlates with tolerance to slow warming but not growth at non-optimal temperatures in zebrafish
Published: 2020-05-08
Subjects: Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Life Sciences, Physiology
Global warming is predicted to increase both acute and prolonged thermal challenges for aquatic ectotherms. Severe short and medium-term thermal stress over hours to days may cause mortality, while longer sub-lethal thermal challenges may cause performance declines. The interrelationship between the responses to short, medium and longer thermal challenges is unresolved. We asked if the same [...]
Why spatial scale matters in predicting synchrony of ecological disruption
Published: 2020-05-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Arising from: C. Trisos et al. Nature 580, 496–501, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2189-9 (2020). ABSTRACT The fundamental assumption behind this provocative study (Trisos et al. 2020) is that current and future climatic tolerance limits for a species can be inferred from the last 170 years of climate records within its current distribution. Using this approach, the authors project the [...]