Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Exploring the interplay of epigenetics and individualization
Published: 2025-03-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
Considering individual differences enhances our understanding of eco-evolutionary processes. Epigenetic modifications, which enable the same genotype to produce different phenotypes, may serve as a key proximate mechanism underlying these differences. We propose that epigenetic mechanisms mediate the realization of individualized niches. This process is best understood by distinguishing between [...]
Agroecological farming promotes yield and biodiversity but may require subsidy to be profitable
Published: 2025-03-04
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Intensive arable agriculture uses agrochemicals to replace ecosystem services (e.g. pest control and soil health) while simultaneously degrading others (e.g. pollination). Agroecological farming aims to reduce this reliance. Whether these practices maintain yields at a scale relevant to farm business viability is unclear. 2. In a 4-year replicated study across 17 English farms we assessed [...]
Beyond the obstetric dilemma: evolutionary maternal-fetal conflict causes health problems in pregnancy and childbirth
Published: 2025-03-03
Subjects: Anthropology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Life Sciences, Maternal and Child Health, Medicine and Health Sciences, Translational Medical Research
In excellent recent work, Webb and colleagues challenged the so-called “obstetric dilemma”—the long-standing hypothesis that human childbearing is particularly dangerous because we have a narrow pelvis but large infant heads (we are bipedal and smart). They showed that humans and chimpanzees have a comparable fetal-pelvic squeeze. What, then, causes risky childbirth in humans? Webb and colleagues [...]
The effect of sex, age, and boldness on inhibitory control
Published: 2025-03-03
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Inhibitory control requires an individual to suppress impulsive actions in favour of more appropriate behaviours to gain a delayed reward. It plays an important role in activities such as foraging and initiating mating, but high within-species variation suggests that some individuals have greater inhibitory control than others. A standard index of inhibitory control used in many taxa is measuring [...]
Heterogeneous individuals impede the establishment of cultures in animal groups
Published: 2025-02-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Social learning facilitates the diffusion of novel behaviours (i.e., inventions) through groups and is a key component in the development of culture. The speed with which an invention spreads through a group is largely determined by the strength of social connections and network structure; however, research concerning the establishment of inventions (i.e., culture) has typically overlooked that [...]
No refuge at the edge for European beech as climate warming disproportionately reduces masting at colder margins
Published: 2025-02-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography
Reproduction is vital for forest resilience to climate change, as tree populations depend on adequate seed production to recover demographically from disturbances and migrate to more suitable sites. Neglecting reproduction in projections of habitat suitability and range shifts risks overestimating forest resilience to climate change. For many tree species, including European beech (Fagus [...]
There is no such thing as an herbivore: incidental and intentional ingestion profoundly affects both herbivores and plant-dwelling invertebrates.
Published: 2025-02-26
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Real-life ‘herbivores’ are not the herbivores of our simplistic ecological and behavioral models – real-life herbivores constantly consume other organisms both incidentally and intentionally, with the ‘prey’ usually consisting of plant-dwelling arthropods, smaller invertebrates, and carrion. A remarkable amount of disparate literature has amassed on these phenomena, yet the implications of these [...]
Landscape anthropization drives composition and diversity of butterfly communities at a regional scale
Published: 2025-02-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim While landscape anthropization is a key driver of biodiversity change, its effects on communities are underexplored, especially at regional scales. In the Anthropocene, climate and habitat diversity alone are insufficient to explain community structure. However, until recently, ecologists lacked accessible, synthesized data describing anthropization gradients, which limited studies to [...]
Belowground communities in lowlands are less stable to heat extremes across seasons
Published: 2025-02-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecological responses to climate extremes vary drastically in different spatiotemporal contexts. Here, we investigate how soil communities at high- and low-elevation sites respond to extreme heat events in different seasons (spring, summer and autumn). We simulated 1-week heat events based on site-specific climatic history in laboratory experiments using 360 field-collected soil cores and measured [...]
Quantifying changes in fish population stability using statistical early warnings of regime shifts
Published: 2025-02-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Ecological conservation and management benefits from tools that can foresee impending problems, or those in early stages. Statistical early warnings of regime shifts, which can identify generic changes in system behavior associated with stability loss and potential abrupt changes to a new, distinct state, are theoretically well grounded and have been successfully applied in real-world settings. [...]
Functional assisted migration to sustain ecosystem functions under climate change
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Climate change is rapidly altering habitats, forcing many plant species to shift their distribution. However, slow dispersal rates and habitat fragmentation hinder their ability to track these changes, risking local extinctions and reduced ecosystem functioning. Current management strategies may not suffice to address these challenges. 2. We propose functional assisted migration (FAM) as a [...]
Projected climate change scenarios spatially decouple desert EFN-ant mutualisms
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Aim: Climate change is changing species distributions globally, but predicting these impacts on assemblages and their spatial overlaps under future scenarios is an ongoing challenge. Here, we explore how climate change influences distributions among two mutualistic assemblages. Location: The Mojave and Colorado Deserts, California, United States Methods: We developed stacked species distribution [...]
estar: An R package to measure ecological stability
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Assessing ecological stability across populations or communities is a prime goal in biodiversity monitoring and conservation research. Quantifying stability is not trivial because its different aspects can be measured with various metrics. However, to date, no software enables measuring different stability metrics on ecological time-series data. 2. We present the estar R package that [...]
Repeated mitochondrial capture with limited genomic introgression in a lizard group
Published: 2025-02-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
Mitochondrial introgression is common among animals and is often first identified through mitonuclear discordance — discrepancies between evolutionary relationships inferred from mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and nuclear DNA (nuDNA). Over recent decades, genomic data have also revealed extensive nuclear introgression in many animal groups, with implications for genetic and phenotypic diversity. [...]
Climate change intensifies plant-pollinator mismatch and increases secondary extinction risk for plants in northern latitudes
Published: 2025-02-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Climate change is altering the timing of species’ life-cycle events (i.e., phenology), but the rates of phenological shifts vary across taxa. These mismatches in phenological response may disrupt interactions between interdependent species, such as plants and their pollinators, which may lead to reduced plant reproduction via pollen limitation and contribute to secondary extinction risks for [...]