Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Sexually antagonistic selection: a review of the theory and its implications
Published: 2026-05-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Population Biology
Sexually antagonistic selection arises when females and males have different fitness optima for traits with a shared genetic basis, so that the same alleles are favoured in one sex but disfavoured in the other. It has been implicated in a wide range of ecological and evolutionary processes, from the maintenance of a sex load to the evolution of sex chromosomes. Mathematical models have long been [...]
Optimizing sampling and monitoring of species interactions within Biodiversity Observation Networks
Published: 2026-05-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Optimal monitoring strategies should be designed to efficiently monitor all essential facets of biodiversity. Yet, species interactions are often overlooked in monitoring designs compared to spatial coverage and species richness, partly due to the inherent difficulty of sampling and monitoring interactions compared to species distributions. Here, we used simulations to test the efficiency of [...]
Invasiveness reshapes the historical pattern of carp trait evolution
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Human-mediated invasions are increasingly recognised as contemporary ecological disturbances with profound impacts on microevolutionary processes. However, whether such impacts extend beyond microevolutionary change to alter long-term evolutionary trajectories across lineages remains poorly explored. Using a global phylogenetic analysis of nearly 1,400 carp species (freshwater fishes of the [...]
Identifying knowledge gaps on simultaneous above- and belowground organism responses to global change
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Global change affects all terrestrial organisms regardless if they live above or below the ground. Even though they are strongly linked by various direct and indirect interactions, organisms can respond very differently to global change stressors, due to different features of above- and belowground compartments. Many different organism groups have shown declines in diversity, abundance or biomass [...]
Multi-scale surveillance reveals substantial egg-laying winter activity in Aedes albopictus mosquito populations across temperate Europe
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
The Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), a competent vector for dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses, has expanded rapidly across temperate Europe. European vector surveillance typically operates May to October, assuming winter diapause precludes activity and transmission risk. However, recent field observations suggest sustained egg-laying winter activity in southern European populations, [...]
Assessing the sensitivity and robustness of the Living Planet Index through simulated population dynamics: strengths, stability, and challenges
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
Understanding population change through time is crucial for effective conservation of biodiversity. The Living Planet Index (LPI) is a key indicator for tracking global species abundance trends under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, offering a picture of population change over time. However, the sensitivity of the index to zero values or to the number of missing values in time [...]
The evolutionary link between food, condiments and medicine
Published: 2026-05-06
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Anthropology, Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Food Science, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The deep relationship between humans and plants is of great interest to ethnobotanists, human ecologists, and evolutionary biologists. Humans have incorporated thousands of plant species into both traditional medicine and our diets, as foods and condiments. Many of these provide not only calories but also micronutrients and other bioactive compounds that contribute to health [1]. The boundaries [...]
Making survival spatial: an integrated model for territory occupancy and capture-recapture data
Published: 2026-05-05
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Knowledge about spatial variation in survival is central to understanding population dynamics and guiding conservation, yet assessing it is very hard. This limitation arises because capture-mark-recapture (CMR) data required for such inference must be collected over large spatial extents, which is logistically demanding and seldom possible. By contrast, territory occupancy (TO) data are typically [...]
Does the substrate on which cryptogams grow matter for limno-terrestrial meiofauna?
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Cryptogam habitats support a wide range of limno-terrestrial meiofauna, but the factors that shape their communities are still not well understood. The physical substrate that cryptogams grow on (e.g., soil, the base of a tree, or its trunk) can influence local moisture, temperature, and nutrient conditions, yet its role in structuring meiofaunal assemblages has rarely been tested systematically. [...]
A Functionally Integrated Symbiotic System as a Mechanism for Angiosperm Diversification
Published: 2026-05-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Plant Sciences, Systems Biology
Flowering plants have maintained exceptionally high diversity for over 100 million years, yet the mechanisms enabling sustained macroevolutionary diversification remain unresolved. Classical theory predicts a trade-off between speciation and extinction, but angiosperms have repeatedly diversified while persisting across heterogeneous environments. Mutualistic interactions, pollination, seed [...]
Global patterns of vulnerability to wildlife exploitation in tropical birds and mammals
Published: 2026-05-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Wildlife exploitation is one of the most pervasive anthropogenic pressures in tropical ecosystems and a major driver of vertebrate population declines, yet global assessments of species vulnerability to hunting remain spatially imprecise and methodologically inconsistent. We combine exposure to hunting with species-specific sensitivity and adaptive capacity to deliver a spatially explicit [...]
Sex differential effects of developmental heat stress on life-history and reproductive traits
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Global warming has led to increased mean global temperatures with projections suggesting continued warming throughout this century, posing an escalating threat to biological systems worldwide. Ectotherms are most vulnerable to this change as heat stress conditions can have severe implications on their development, mating interactions, and fitness. However, the sex-specific effects of [...]
The significance gap: statistical significance rates decrease from primary literature to effects used in ecological meta-analyses
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Extending {spatsoc} to measure intragroup social dynamics
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Software Engineering
Beyond proximity-based social networks and home range overlap, animal telemetry data can also be used to measure intragroup social dynamics including individual position within groups, individual and group level movement directions, leadership patterns and lagged follower behaviours. We used a scoping review of literature across domains, including behavioural ecology, collective movement, and [...]
Lead and slant on the geometry of coiling in gastropods
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Molluscan shells have been studied with various geometric models. Here I show that lead angle, the defining slope of a conical helix, emerges as a more useful parameter in morphometric analyses and (adaptationist) interpretation of covariation in coiling parameters. The widely used apical semiangle becomes redundant and uninformative, a passive consequence of taxon-specific lead angles and [...]