Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Are tropical ant and termite assemblages along a forest recovery gradient habitat or dispersal limited?
Published: 2025-03-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Regenerating forests comprise a significant proportion of forest ecosystems in the tropics. While we are beginning to understand assembly mechanisms of tree communities after anthropogenic disturbances, those of animal communities are still poorly understood. It has been shown that locally established ant communities clearly assemble along gradients of forest recovery from active agriculture over [...]
Variation in successional niche turnover of multiple taxa in a recovering tropical rainforest
Published: 2025-03-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Understanding the niche turnover of ecological communities is fundamental for advancing successional theory and effective restoration. However, since niche preferences are known for a few taxa, ecosystem succession is only partially understood. To fill this gap, using a null model approach, we determined the niche optimal within eighteen ecological communities (bacteria, animals, and plants) [...]
Recovery of phylogenetic diversity and phylogenetic structure in trees and animals along a chronosequence of tropical forest regeneration
Published: 2025-03-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Tropical forests are highly threatened habitats with the capacity to recover after disturbance. Integrating phylogenies in the study of forest recovery provides key information on the evolutionary relationships of communities through succession, and also serves as a proxy of their functional trait diversity and resilience capacity. We used phylogenetic and community data for trees and animal [...]
Quantifying macro-evolutionary patterns of trait mean and variance with phylogenetic location-scale models
Published: 2025-03-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Understanding how both the mean (location) and variance (scale) of traits differ among species and lineages is fundamental to unveiling macroevolutionary patterns. Yet, traditional phylogenetic comparative methods primarily focus on modelling mean trait values, often overlooking variability and heteroscedasticity that can provide critical insights into evolutionary dynamics. Here, we introduce [...]
Responses to climate change – insights and limitations from herbaceous plant model systems
Published: 2025-03-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Sciences
Herbaceous plant species have been the focus of extensive, long-term research into climate change responses, but there has been little effort to synthesize results and predicted outlooks from different model species. We summarize research on climate change responses for eight intensively-studied herbaceous plant species. We establish generalities across species, examine limitations, interrogate [...]
Inbreeding and high developmental temperatures affect cognition and boldness in guppies (Poecilia reticulata)
Published: 2025-03-22
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Inbreeding impairs the cognitive abilities of humans, but its impact on cognition in other animals is poorly studied. For example, environmental stress (e.g. food limitation and extreme temperatures) often amplifies inbreeding depression in morphological traits, but whether cognition is similarly affected is unclear. We, therefore, tested if a higher temperature (30°C versus 26°C) during [...]
Paternity analysis reveals sexual selection on cognitive performance in mosquitofish
Published: 2025-03-22
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In many animal species, cognitive abilities are under strong natural selection because decisions about foraging, habitat choice and predator avoidance affect fecundity and survival. But how has sexual selection, which is usually stronger on males than females, shaped the evolution of cognitive abilities that influence success when competing for mates or fertilizations? We aimed to investigate [...]
Alike but still different: coexistence of four raptor species explained by breeding niche overlap
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Late Pleistocene faunal community patterns disrupted by Holocene human impacts
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Paleobiology
We analysed fossil mammal assemblages from over 350 Late Pleistocene and Holocene sites worldwide to test whether human activities, such as agriculture, domestication and intensified land use, restructured global patterns of mammal co-occurrence. Using presence-absence data, we contrasted a novel iterative ‘chase clustering’ method, which is compositionally driven, against a traditional spatially [...]
No evidence for assortative mating in the Atlantic puffin
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Assortative mating occurs when individuals with similar phenotypes mate together more often than by chance and can contribute to increases in homozygosity, linkage disequilibrium between loci, and premating isolation in a phenotypically divergent population. While this phenomenon has been well documented in many avian species, evidence is relatively scarce in seabirds. Most seabirds are [...]
Increased Arctic fire occurrence related to human activity calls for improved management
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Arctic fires have become more frequent in recent decades. They release carbon to the atmosphere through burning organic material and degrading permafrost and thus accelerate global warming. Previous research highlighted climate variables as the driving factor of fire occurrence in the Arctic, largely ignoring the contribution of human activity. Here, we analyzed the relationship between fire [...]
Social Learning and Culture in Birds: Emerging Patterns and Relevance to Conservation
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
There is now abundant evidence for a role of social learning and culture in shaping behaviour in a range of avian species across multiple contexts, from migration routes in geese and foraging behaviour in crows, to passerine song. Recent emerging evidence has further linked culture to fitness outcomes in some birds, highlighting its potential importance for conservation. Here, we first summarise [...]
Viability selection on coat spot patterns correlates with temperature anomalies in Masai giraffes
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Remarkable variation in animal colour patterns is often shaped by heterogeneous selection, reflecting adaptation to variable environmental conditions. However, the adaptive functions of patterns and drivers of selection remain poorly understood. Shape and size of colour patterns may help with thermoregulation and thus be altered by temperature anomalies, which are predicted to be more frequent [...]
Citizen science data supports sexual dichromatism but rejects thermal melanism in the European fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra)
Published: 2025-03-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Background Conspicuous color patterns are traditionally believed to advertise the toxicity of prey to potential predators. However, many aposematic species show drastic variation in coloration, indicating the possibility of other functions of coloration. To study these other functions, we can investigate the influence of inherent (e.g., sex) and external factors (e.g., climate) on color [...]
Predicting interaction frequency in plant-pollinator networks
Published: 2025-03-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Flowers and their pollinators represent a bipartite interaction system, whose links are hypothesised to be related to species traits. To explore whether we can predict the weight of this link, i.e. the frequency of interactions, in an validation network, we analysed 14 studies of pollinator-flower visitation network from around the world. We used information on species abundances, their traits [...]