Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Rodenticides now ubiquitous in wildlife of Italian landscapes
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
Second Generation Anticoagulant Rodenticides (SGARs) are used to control synantropic rodents and therefore also affect non-target wildlife. However, no study tested for their presence across a whole assemblage of wildlife, limiting our understanding of their overall circulation and exposure pathways. We tested for SGARs in a large sample of terrestrial mammals (n = 403) and birds (n = 189), that [...]
Genome-wide strengthening of evolutionary constraint across the volvocine multicellularity gradient
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics
The evolutionary cost of maintaining somatic cell populations has been hypothesised to drive proteome-wide strengthening of constraint on coding sequence at the origin of multicellularity. Prior work on the volvocine clade has reported lower d_N/d_S in colonial than in unicellular relatives on 55 chloroplast genes (Hu et al. 2019) and on 105 nuclear single-copy orthogroups across colonial species [...]
Technology should support, not sideline, locally driven conservation and restoration monitoring
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies
The choice of how to monitor conservation and restoration is not solely technical – it shapes which outcomes are valued, whose priorities define success, where resources flow, and who benefits. The shift toward tech-based monitoring, driven by demand for scalable metrics, risks incomplete ecological understanding, sidelining Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) from data ownership and [...]
Bridging nutritional geometry and network ecology to quantify the robustness of nutritional networks
Published: 2026-07-01
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Nutrition, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Understanding the robustness and resilience of ecological networks is key to managing ecosystems and mitigating biodiversity loss. Simple models of network robustness simulate species losses across ecological networks but lack physiological realism, asserting that species persist if they interact with another organism. This neglects the nutritional consequences of resource loss and nutrition as a [...]
Species diversity reduces risk in tropical forest restoration: a portfolio effect across heterogeneous sites
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Assisted restoration is essential for recovering degraded tropical forests. Biodiversity-stability theory predicts that functionally diverse communities should produce more reliable, predictable outcomes than monocultures, but broad-scale field experiments in tropical restoration are scarce. We established 120 plots spanning five planting treatments (two monocultures – of a fast-growing [...]
Variable patterns of local adaptation along an elevation gradient in a host-pathogen interaction
Published: 2026-06-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The strength of biotic interactions is hypothesized to decrease with elevation, yet it remains unclear whether this decline results in weaker selection at higher elevations. Further, it is not known if varying ecological interactions along elevation gradients affect the patterns of local adaptation between hosts and pathogens. Here, we experimentally test whether the direction and strength of [...]
Best analytical practices for estimating consumer reliance on basal food sources using bulk stable isotopes
Published: 2026-06-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Bulk stable isotopes have been utilised by ecologists for decades to trace the assimilation of basal food sources across trophic positions. However, there is a lack of guidance on the post-laboratory analytical workflow, leading to inconsistencies in how isotopic data are processed and interpreted. 2. We provide a comprehensive description of this necessary post-laboratory analytical [...]
Avian Population Genomics: Latest Findings and Future Prospects
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Birds are one of the most recognizable and diverse groups of organisms on Earth. This group has played an important role in many fields, including the development of methods in behavioral ecology and evolutionary theory. The use of population genomics took off following the increased accessibility of high-throughput sequencing across taxa. Several features of bird genomes make them particularly [...]
Natural history models of bird–building collisions
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Building collisions kill an estimated 1.28–5.19 billion birds annually in North America, making them the second leading cause of human-related avian mortality. Yet the behavioral and ecological drivers of collisions remain difficult to disentangle, as most knowledge derives from carcass surveys rather than direct observations. Here, we propose a conceptual framework that synthesizes four natural [...]
Choosing the Response Matrix: Generalised Linear Latent Variable Models for Multivariate Ecology and Evolution
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Multivariate responses are central to ecology and evolutionary biology, but their covariance is often difficult to model and interpret. Generalised linear latent variable models (GLLVMs) provide a parsimonious way to represent covariance among many responses using a smaller number of latent variables. They are widely used for Site X Species data in joint species distribution modelling and [...]
A new computational framework for speeding up the fitting of multistate capture–mark–recapture models
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
1. Multistate capture–mark–recapture (CMR) models are widely used to estimate the parameters governing demographic processes such as survival, dispersal, and recruitment in animal populations. In Bayesian analyses, the multinomial likelihood of multistate CMR models summarizes individual encounter histories into groups defined by states and capture occasions, and is regarded as a computationally [...]
Beyond mistakes: same-sex partner acceptance and broad mating filters coexist in termite pairing
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution
Same-sex sexual behavior is often interpreted either as a mistake arising from indiscriminate attempts or as an adaptive behavior directed towards same-sex partners. These explanations are typically considered mutually exclusive. Here we challenge this assumption using an adaptive same-sex pairing system in Reticulitermes termites. Long-term male-male pairings originate from tandem running, in [...]
Tree species richness and forest structure influence vertebrate scavenging
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Management
Tree species richness can alter forest structure and resource availability, often enhancing ecosystem functioning. However, biodiversity–ecosystem functioning research has largely focused on plant-mediated processes, leaving it unclear whether vertebrate-mediated functions such as carrion scavenging respond similarly to tree species richness. We investigated how tree species richness, canopy [...]
Visual-chemotactic saltatory search in Octopus hummelincki (Mollusca, Cephalopoda): a case study in the South Atlantic
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
We report for the first time evidence of foraging by Octopus hummelincki and analyze it using saltatory search theory, which posits alternating phases of locomotion and stationary search. Our data showed that substrate complexity dictates behavioral transitions: locomotion predominated in sand, whereas solid substrates elicited tactile exploration. The move-to-search scaling ratio (0.63) aligns [...]
A mathematical foundation of modelling thermal injury and repair dynamics in ectotherms
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Evolution, Life Sciences, Physiology, Plant Sciences, Population Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Survival Analysis
As global temperatures rise and extreme heat events impair ectotherm performance and survival, it is becoming increasingly important to predict how organisms accumulate and repair thermal injury under realistic benign and stressful temperatures. The thermal death time (TDT) model quantifies how heat events translate into thermal injury, but under natural temperature fluctuations the TDT model is [...]