Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
A systematic map and comprehensive database of animal organ sizes
Published: 2026-02-12
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health
The relationship between individual organ size and overall body size in animals is a fundamental biological phenomenon that spans multiple disciplines. However, a comprehensive synthesis of the sources of variation in organ-specific scaling remains lacking, even among mammals, the most extensively studied vertebrate group. We developed a systematic map and compiled a large database of paired [...]
Interplay of diet, heat stress, and the microbiome shapes health and escape behavior in amphibian larvae
Published: 2026-02-11
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Microbiology, Organismal Biological Physiology
Diet influences animal health and their microbiomes, potentially affecting how they cope with environmental stressors such as rising temperatures and altered food quality associated with climate change. Using a multifactorial experiment, larvae of the frog Rana temporaria were reared on three diets differing in protein, fat, and animal-derived components (low-, intermediate-, and high-quality), [...]
Have human impacts exceeded climate in shaping mammalian distributions?
Published: 2026-02-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Human impacts are increasingly recognized as drivers of biogeographic patterns, yet it remains unclear whether they surpass climate in shaping species distributions. Here we aim to investigate the relative importance of anthropogenic vs. climatic factors in determining mammalian distributions. We modeled the relationship between the geographic distributions of 219 mammal species and 12 [...]
Modeling evolutionary rescue
Published: 2026-02-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A population that avoids extinction by adapting to environmental change is said to be rescued by evolution. Evolutionary rescue is of fundamental interest in ecology and evolution and of great relevance in conservation, where rescue of endangered species is wanted, and in medicine and agriculture, where rescue (resistance evolution) of pathogens, cancers, and pests is unwanted. Theory plays a key [...]
Life cycle complexity drives variation in thermal tolerance and plasticity
Published: 2026-02-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Accumulating evidence suggests that heat tolerance varies substantially across insect development, yet patterns of variation remain difficult to generalise across species. We discuss how the diversity of insect developmental strategies shapes both the intensity and predictability of thermal environments across ontogeny, and how this likely generates variation in heat tolerance, plasticity, and [...]
Insect Pests on the Move: Climate, Soil, Land Use, and the Search for Contingent Generality
Published: 2026-02-09
Subjects: Agriculture, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Climate change is reshaping the geographic distributions of insect pests, with major consequences for agriculture, forestry, and ecosystem stability. Species distribution models (SDMs) are widely used to project these changes, yet most rely primarily on climatic predictors and implicitly assume a degree of generality in species responses that may not hold across diverse taxa. Here, we evaluate [...]
The origins and diversification of hummingbird pollination in Bromeliaceae
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Plant Sciences
Bromeliaceae are a model group for understanding explosive Neotropical diversification, combining remarkable ecological breadth and high species richness, despite relatively recent evolutionary origins. Multiple drivers are hypothesised to accelerate bromeliad diversification, and hummingbird pollination is frequently proposed to be among the strongest. However, our understanding has been limited [...]
Passive acoustic monitoring outperforms observer-based methods for Australian frog communities
Published: 2026-02-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Effective biodiversity monitoring is fundamental for evaluating conservation status and detecting population declines, yet traditional observer-based monitoring (OBM) is often constrained by high costs and logistical challenges resulting in limited spatial and temporal coverage. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) offers a scalable alternative, but its efficacy for frog biodiversity assessments [...]
One Toolbox, Many Tools: A Practitioner’s Guide to Latent Variable Modelling for Community Ecology
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Multivariate Analysis, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Methodology, Statistical Models
In this article, we present the case for Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models (GLLVMs) as a go-to choice of statistical method for any community ecologist wanting to tackle a range of present-day ecological research questions. GLLVMs bring tools and capabilities from classic (mixed-effects) regression models to multivariate community analysis, providing a number of novel ways to tailor [...]
Predicting demographic impacts from sublethal cumulative effects of offshore renewable developments on breeding seabirds
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology, Population Biology
1. Offshore renewable developments (ORDs) are often located in habitat used by protected seabird species and may cause sublethal effects by altering movement patterns and displacing individuals from key resources. Predicting how these effects translate into population-level impacts is challenging for long-lived species because demographic consequences emerge from complex, state-dependent [...]
Superorganismal Anisogamy: a Comparative Test of an Extended Theory
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Multicellular organisms and superorganisms (e.g., ant colonies) are both products of major evolutionary transitions in individuality, and they share many analogous traits. Theory developed to explain the evolution of one such trait, anisogamy, has recently been adapted to explain its superorganismal analogue: large egg-like queens and small sperm-like males. To test this theory with comparative [...]
Age class and natal origin drive foraging patterns in a reintroduced Cinereous Vulture population
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ornithology
Widespread vulture population declines are often counteracted by conservation strategies including reintroduction programs and supplementary feeding schemes. However, the role of supplementary feeding – focusing on specific, predictable, feeding sites - on movement behaviour, has been little explored, especially within populations in which reintroduced and wild born birds of different age-classes [...]
General flowering in temperate forests arises from multi-timescale community synchrony
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Community-wide “general flowering” has been regarded as a tropical phenomenon. Here, we show that temperate forests also exhibit community-wide flowering at the regional scale. Annual seed-production records for seven dominant tree species across 432 forest sites, analysed with timescale-explicit wavelet metrics, reveal landscape-scale synchrony structured by two periods — a 2–4-year band and a [...]
Spatial resolution and temperature matter for mapping Cerrado wetlands and dry grasslands
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Wetlands in the Brazilian Cerrado play key roles in regional carbon and water cycles but remain poorly mapped due to their patchy distribution and seasonal variability. Therefore, knowing where and when they occur is urgently needed. To address this gap, we evaluated how spatial resolution and inclusion of thermal (on top of traditional multispectral) data affected wetland vs. dry grassland [...]
The conditional ecology of pest suppression: A general mechanistic framework for predicting landscape effects on biological control
Published: 2026-02-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
Landscape heterogeneity often increases natural enemy abundance, yet its effects on crop pest suppression are strikingly inconsistent across empirical studies. We developed a trait-based simulation framework to identify the general mechanisms linking landscape structure to realized pest load. Across >150 in silico experiments, we show that landscape attributes influence biological control by [...]