Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The legacy of privilege: Social inheritance reverses sex differences in reproductive inequality in spotted hyenas
Published: 2025-12-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Inequalities in reproductive success among females and males shape natural and sexual selec-tion, as well as genetic diversity. A key mechanism influencing reproductive inequality in humans and other animals is the social inheritance of privilege. Using a 29-year dataset spanning eight generations of spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta), a species in which social status is maternally inherited, we [...]
Towards a causal understanding of bidirectional effects in ecology and evolution
Published: 2025-11-29
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series
Feedback loops govern many processes in the natural world and are ubiquitous in ecology and evolutionary biology. Despite their prevalence in theory, however, feedbacks and other forms of reciprocal causation are rarely quantified by empiricists working with observational datasets. This divide has been brought to the fore by the causal revolution in the natural sciences. When researchers aim to [...]
Tagged for life? Retention rates and effects on growth and condition of tagging - a long-term field study on PIT- and Carlin tagging in European eel
Published: 2025-11-29
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Different types of tags and markers are commonly used for various fish monitoring and tracking purposes. Effects of tags and markers on fish and the retention rates can affect the interpretation of mark-recapture data on both the individual (e.g. growth and body condition) and population level (e.g. survival and pro-duction estimates), making studies of this issue important. In this study, we [...]
Adaptive introgression in the context of climate adaptation
Published: 2025-11-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics
As the biosphere faces accelerating environmental disruption, including climate change, and the prospect of an anthropogenically-driven mass extinction, understanding the mechanisms that enable species to adapt has become increasingly urgent. One mechanism attracting growing attention is adaptive introgression, the transfer of beneficial genetic variation between closely related species. Although [...]
Quantifying impacts of policy and practice interventions on biodiversity and climate
Published: 2025-11-28
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
There is urgent demand for ecosystem management interventions – targeted actions through policies and practices – that meaningfully address climate change and biodiversity loss while sustaining ecosystem delivery of water, food, fibre and fuel. Rigorous quantification of intervention outcomes is required for decision makers to identify, promote and scale effective interventions. Yet [...]
Forest fecundity declines as climate shifts
Published: 2025-11-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Tree fecundity underpins regeneration, range tracking, and seed supply for assisted migration, yet may decline as climates move beyond reproductive niches. Using 34 years of nationwide harvest records from Poland (40,530 observations across 438 forest districts) for five dominant taxa — oaks (Quercus robur, Q. petraea), European beech (Fagus sylvatica), Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris), and silver [...]
Plasticity and scaling through multinucleation: a key adaptation to challenging environments
Published: 2025-11-26
Subjects: Cell and Developmental Biology, Cell Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Multinucleate cells, single cells containing multiple nuclei in a shared cytoplasm, are found across the eukaryotic tree of life. Having evolved independently in fungi, plants, protists, and animals, they thrive in environments ranging from nutrient-poor deep-sea sediments to dynamic soil microhabitats and host tissues. Multinucleate organization enables spatial specialization without internal [...]
Large regional variation in global impacts of agriculture on terrestrial insects and other arthropods
Published: 2025-11-26
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Many insects and other arthropods are reported to be in rapid decline worldwide, mainly driven by changes in land use and climate. At the same time, arthropods provide many important services that benefit agriculture, and thus their losses may pose risks to food security. Although biodiversity responses vary between global realms, this spatial heterogeneity is not well-understood and is rarely [...]
Unravelling the Enigma of Soil Animal Diversity: An Integrated Perspective from Functional Traits to Evolutionary History
Published: 2025-11-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Why does a single square meter of forest soil harbour thousands of animal species? Fifty years after J.M. Anderson raised this question, soil ecology still struggles with a fragmented view of coexistence. Researchers often study taxonomy, functional traits, and phylogeny in isolation. Each approach adds insight but leaves gaps in the picture of soil biodiversity. In this paper, I therefore [...]
A novel semantic theory of the assembly rules of interaction networks
Published: 2025-11-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
In the web of life, every interaction between species tells a story of cooperation, conflict, or chance. For centuries, ecologists have charted these stories to better understand phenomena such as pollination and disease. We have been using the lens of network science to distill them into topological patterns such as nestedness or modularity. Yet, like in the old buddhist parable of the blind [...]
Humanity’s redistribution of global biomass flows
Published: 2025-11-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The biosphere is connected by flows of organic material (biomass), through biogenic (e.g., animal migration) or anthropogenic pathways (e.g., trade). We argue that humans have drastically altered Earth’s biomass flows by disrupting animal movement, directly transporting biomass and creating novel biotic pathways. In 2023, transnational anthropogenic transport of biomass through trade far exceeded [...]
Response to “Radiolarian evolution: Analytical challenges in estimating the diversity and origin of Nature’s stars”
Published: 2025-11-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Genetics and Genomics, Marine Biology
We appreciate Daniel Lahr’s concern (Lahr, 2025) on the interpretation and conclusions of our study “Extant diversity, biogeography, and evolutionary history of Radiolaria” (Sandin et al., 2025). Given that some of these comments were already addressed in our original study following reviewers comments and that such issues are well known in the molecular diversity and evolution fields we [...]
Dispersion tests in generalised linear mixed-effects models - a methods comparison and practical guide
Published: 2025-11-14
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistical Models
1. Underdispersion and overdispersion are common issues when analysing ecological data with generalised linear (mixed) models (GLMs/GLMMs). Overdispersion, the phenomenon where observations spread wider than expected by the fitted model, leads to anti-conservative p-values and, thus, to inflated type I error. In contrast, underdispersion, a narrower spread of the data than expected, causes overly [...]
Ecological, demographic and social factors shape helping decisions at different spatial scales in a facultative cooperative breeder
Published: 2025-11-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The fitness consequences of cooperative breeding are increasingly well understood, but the ecological and demographic factors driving helping remain contentious. Comparative and single-species studies have identified factors that promote the evolution of helping, but analyses typically test single hypotheses so the relative importance of different factors, and the spatial scale of their [...]
Barking up the wrong tree? Indian street dog woes are emblematic of ecological governance failures for multispecies coexistence
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
On August 11, 2025, India’s Supreme Court mandated relocating 2.5 million dogs to address bites and zoonotic disease/death concerns—but reversed course twice since then—revealing that solutions require sequential waste management, education, and sterilization that prioritize addressing root demographic and behavioral drivers over reactive management.