Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Oak gall wasps lack conserved microbial symbionts
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Herbivorous insects frequently rely on microbial partners to exploit their host plants, yet for gall-inducing insect taxa, there were few attempts to comprehensively resolve their microbial associations. To address this gap, we characterised microbial abundance, composition and specificity in three Polish populations of cherry oak gall wasps (Cynips quercusfolii), a highly specialized [...]
From Temperate to Boreal -- Untangling the Importance of Environment, Space, and Species Co-distributions in Forest Plant Distributions
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim Quantify how environmental conditions, spatial autocorrelation, and species co-distributions shape forest plant community at regional scale. Location Southern Québec, Canada, between the 45th and 53rd parallels. Period From 1986 to 2000. Major taxa studied Vascular plants, mosses, and lichens. Methods We analyzed the presence-absence of 224 plant species across 28,210 ecological [...]
SORTEE five years on: taking stock of the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary biology
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In five years, the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (SORTEE) has grown from a small network of like-minded researchers into a grassroots, international community. Founded in late 2020, SORTEE works to make ecology and evolutionary biology more open, reliable, and transparent at a time when prevailing incentives in academia often reward novelty and [...]
Human-mediated community assembly reshapes urban phytochemical diversity
Published: 2026-10-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Sciences
Human activities increasingly determine which plant species coexist, particularly in cities, yet whether this reshapes the chemical dimension of biodiversity remains largely unknown. Here, we investigated how human-mediated plant community assembly influences phytochemical diversity by integrating community composition, functional traits, phylogenetic relationships, leaf metabolomes, and floral [...]
Size-dependent beak shape divergence between Parrot and Common Crossbills likely involves major developmental changes
Published: 2026-10-22
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Forest Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Zoology
We studied allometry, here defined as shape-size covariation, to explore the unresolved case of divergence between the Parrot and Common Crossbill. Using geometric morphometrics, we compared beak shape and allometry among the Parrot Crossbill, the Common Crossbill and the more distantly related Two-Barred Crossbill. The Parrot Crossbill differed from the two other species in shape changes that [...]
Functional gene content of fungi in a pine needle disease system largely reflects their phylogeny
Published: 2026-10-21
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Evolution, Forest Sciences, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Genomics, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Pathogenic Microbiology, Plant Pathology, Plant Sciences
Background: Fungi recovered from diseased host tissue can differ substantially in functional gene content, but interpreting that variation requires knowing how it relates to evolutionary history. Results: We assembled and annotated genomes for 67 fungi cultured from pine needles with symptoms of brown spot needle blight and compared them with 13 reference genomes, including established pine [...]
A common benchmark for Aedes albopictus phenological models reveals surveillance data, not model complexity, as the limiting factor
Published: 2026-10-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Forecasting the seasonal dynamics of Aedes albopictus, a highly invasive arbovirus vector now established across much of Europe, is a growing public health priority. Numerous mechanistic and correlative models have been developed over the last two decades, but largely in isolation, each calibrated and validated against its own data, which has prevented any assessment of where predictive capacity [...]
Linguistic Group Marking as an Emergent Phenomenon
Published: 2026-10-19
Subjects: Demography, Population, and Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This paper examines how linguistic group marking can emerge from the interaction between social ecology, inferential cognition, and cultural transmission. An agent-based model (ABM) simulates interactions within a structured population where agents use domain-general inference and social learning to interpret and adopt linguistic variants. The model implements a mechanism in which uncertainty [...]
Stridulation rate as a thermometer in Tettigonia viridissima: a season-long automated record and a test against archive recordings
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
That an insect's song rate follows its temperature has been known since Dolbear proposed reading a cricket as a thermometer in 1897. The relation is not in doubt; its functional form is. Walker (1975a) found stridulation rate approximately linear in ten species of Orchelimum and, reanalysing fifteen published datasets, found linear fits better than exponential in thirteen — but his data were [...]
Elevation gradients shape morphology and acoustic phenotype across isolated songbird populations
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ornithology
Elevational gradients provide natural experiments for examining how environmental variation shapes animal phenotypes. In birds, geographic variation in body size may also influence song frequency because vocal production is constrained by morphology. We tested whether elevation and temperature are associated with coordinated variation in morphology and song frequency in Berthelot’s pipit (Anthus [...]
Beyond the Vertebrate Model: Insights from Insect Stress Responses
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Behavioral Neurobiology, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Genetics, Molecular Genetics, Systems Biology, Zoology
Stress responses are essential for survival, coordinating behavioural, physiological and molecular adjustments that enable organisms to cope with challenges. Most research has focused on vertebrates, leaving invertebrate stress physiology comparatively underexplored, particularly in insects. In this review, we compare insect and vertebrate stress responses to examine what insects reveal about the [...]
Parasitism of an intertidal foundation species: Allometric scaling and environmental constraints on trematode distribution in barnacles across biological scales
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Parasites of foundation species, such as fucoids, mussels, and barnacles, can shape the intertidal communities that depend on them, yet their effects remain poorly understood. On rocky shores of the Northeast Pacific, the acorn barnacle Balanus glandula forms dense aggregations that provide habitat for other species. We investigated infection by the microphallid trematode Maritrema gratiosum in [...]
Interactive effects of land use change and climate drive the decline of a threatened boreal forest orchid in Finland
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Land use and climate change are two of the greatest threats to biodiversity globally. However, their interactive effects remain poorly understood. In the boreal forest biome, where species are experiencing increasing pressures from forest management and climate change, improved understanding of these effects is urgently needed. Here, we assess the impacts of forest loss and both baseline and [...]
Selection Effects Associated with Leaf Area and Stomatal Density Drive Productivity of Young Temperate Tree Communities Under Different Water Exclusion Treatments
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. A positive relationship between species richness and productivity has been observed in forests around the world. The two classes of mechanisms thought to underlie this relationship, complementarity effects and selection effects, both rely on species’ traits, whereby the diversity of traits (under complementarity effects) or the presence of specific trait values (under selection effects) can [...]
Occurrence records recover moth flight timing but compress interannual phenological variation
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phenological shifts are important indicators of climate-change responses, but large-scale inference requires coverage that structured monitoring rarely provides. Occurrence databases such as GBIF offer an alternative, although the reliability of different phenological metrics remains uncertain. I compared five metrics (Q10, Q50 and Q90 timing quantiles, weighted mean flight date and season width) [...]