Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Cooperation in non-family groups as a strategy for reproducing in variable climates
Published: 2024-10-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The global climate is changing to be more extreme and less predictable, threatening many species. Cooperative breeding is more common under such conditions, indicating it may improve resilience to challenging climates. However, whether specific features of cooperative breeding systems, such as how groups form and how large they become, evolved to cope with particular climates is unclear. We test [...]
Local knowledge enhances the sustainability of interconnected fisheries
Published: 2024-10-08
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Global demand for natural resources challenges the sustainability of small-scale fisheries. Fisheries Co-Management (FCM), where management is shared between the government and locals, is crucial for maintaining viable fish populations while mitigating market pressures and illegal fishing. Using a data-informed model applied to a fish metapopulation network, we contrasted the effects of various [...]
Temporal stability in songs across the breeding range of the Mourning Warbler may be due to learning fidelity and transmission biases
Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology
We found a stable pattern of geographic variation in songs across the breeding range of the Mourning Warbler over a 36 yr period. The Western, Eastern, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland regiolects found in 2005-2009 also existed from 1983-1988 and 2017-2019. Each regiolect contained a pool of syllables that were unique and different from the other regiolects. The primary syllable types that defined [...]
Anthropogenic lighting affects moth abundance and diversity differently across ecosystems
Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Light pollution poses a significant threat to nocturnal insects, yet our understanding of how insects are affected by lighting across ecosystems is limited. The purpose of this study was to investigate differences in light-induced attraction in abundance and diversity of moths in forest and grassland ecosystems. This study presents a novel comparison of moth attraction between these ecosystems [...]
Density dependence impacts our understanding of population resilience
Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Current metrics of demographic resilience (e.g., resistance, recovery) summarize the potential responses of populations to the frequent, varied disturbances that ecological systems experience. Much of the application of these metrics has focused on the potential response of time-invariant, density-independent structured population models to hypothetical disturbances. Here, we examine such [...]
Spatial microbial flows: hidden fluxes of detritus, diversity, and function in meta-ecosystems
Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences
Ecosystems are linked by spatial flows of energy, nutrients, and organisms across ecosystem boundaries, forming a meta-ecosystem. The study of spatial flows has typically focused on fluxes of materials (e.g., nutrients or organic matter) and conspicuous organisms (e.g., fish or insects). However, recent evidence from field studies has suggested that numerically significant spatial flows of [...]
Copy-paste augmentation improves automatic species identification in camera trap images
Published: 2024-09-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Effective conservation requires effective biodiversity monitoring. The pace of global biodiversity change far outstrips the ability of manual fieldwork to monitor it. Therefore, technological solutions, like camera traps, have emerged as a crucial way to meet biodiversity monitoring needs. Camera traps produce vast amounts of data and so AI is increasingly used to label images with species [...]
How can we make conferences more inclusive? Lessons from the International Ethological Congress
Published: 2024-09-24
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Despite growing awareness of the importance of researcher diversity, barriers to inclusion and equity persist in science and at academic conferences. As hosts of the 37th International Ethological Congress, “Behaviour 2023”, we studied equity, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) issues using observational and experimental behavioural data collected during question and answer (Q&A) sessions in [...]
Phylogenetic Diversity vs H-Index – does genetics or culture lead conservation research?
Published: 2024-09-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
With so many species in decline it is difficult to know where conservation effort and funding should be dedicated. A common prioritization argument is species uniqueness and phylogenetic diversity, where those with unique evolutionary history are thought to be especially valuable. However, despite frequent calls for better prioritization, research interest is often idiosyncratic, pragmatic, and [...]
Wild vs. domestic ungulate ecosystem impacts: understanding functional differences requires greater focus on mechanisms
Published: 2024-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Ungulates play vital roles in ecological systems, shaping plant biomass and diversity via herbivory and impacting soil properties through trampling and nutrient deposition. As ungulate communities fluctuate across the globe, the extent to which wild ungulates and domestic livestock can play similar ecological roles is an increasingly vital - and fraught - question. Here, we synthesized the [...]
Spatial connectivity through mountains and deserts drove South American scorpion's dispersal
Published: 2024-09-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
We inferred the geographic dispersal routes and the environmental conditions that shaped the ~30-million-years historical biogeography of Brachistosternus scorpions in South America. We evaluated the role that altitude and aridity had on the geographic distance that each species dispersed from the location of the genus common ancestor. Based on previous studies, we evaluated the hypothesis [...]
Demographic expansion and panmixia in a St. Martin endemic, Anolis pogus, coincides with the decline of a competitor
Published: 2024-09-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Population Biology, Zoology
Understanding patterns of differentiation at microgeographic scales can enhance our understanding of evolutionary dynamics and lead to the development of effective conservation strategies. In particular, high levels of landscape heterogeneity can strongly influence species abundances, genetic structure, and demographic trends. The bearded anole, Anolis pogus, is endemic to the topographically [...]
An introduction to generative network models and how they may be used to study animal sociality
Published: 2024-09-18
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Social networks constitute an important approach in the study of animal social behaviour. So far, focus has been on statistical analysis of animal social network structures. However, social networks can also be studied by generative network models - procedures that create simulated network structures. These models play a key role in wider network science, but despite occasional use, have not yet [...]
On the Origin of Nightjars (Caprimulgidae): Perspectives from the Fossil Record
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology
Fossils represent the only direct evidence for the ancestral morphologies, antiquity, and historical geographic distributions of life on Earth. The fossil record of the avian clade Strisores (which includes nightjars, oilbirds, potoos, frogmouths, owlet-nightjars, treeswifts, swifts, and hummingbirds) has been richly documented by avian standards, with well-corroborated stem-group representatives [...]
The radiation and geographic expansion of primates through diverse climates
Published: 2024-09-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
One of the most influential hypotheses about primate evolution postulates that their origin, radiation, and major dispersals were associated with exceptionally warm conditions in tropical forests at northern latitudes (henceforth the warm tropical forest hypothesis). However, this notion has proven difficult to test given the overall uncertainty about both geographic locations and paleoclimates [...]