Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Anticoagulant rodenticides are climbing the food chain to the top: a first proof of widespread positivity in grey wolves (Canis lupus)
Published: 2023-06-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health
Second-generation Anticoagulant Rodenticides (ARs) can be particularly critical for large carnivores, due to their widespread use and time-delayed impacts on their populations. While many studies explored the impacts of ARs on small and mesocarnivores, no study explored the extent to which they could contaminate large carnivores in anthropized landscapes of Europe. We filled this gap by [...]
Welcoming more participation in open data science for the oceans
Published: 2023-05-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology
Open science is a global movement happening across all research fields. It builds on years of efforts by individual researchers and a broad array of institutions, agencies, and grassroots organizations. Enabled by technology and the open web, the goal is to share knowledge and broaden participation in science, from team formation and early ideation to making intermediate and final research [...]
The trade-off between vocal learning and dexterity: a balancing act
Published: 2023-05-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Behavioral Neurobiology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Uncontroversial evidence of vocal production learning, the capacity to modify vocal output on the basis of experience, is sparsely distributed in the animal kingdom. We suggest that this is in large part due to a trade-off between vocal learning complexity and a much more widely distributed trait—non-vocal dexterity. We argue that given some generally required neural and anatomical conditions for [...]
Predation and biophysical context control long-term carcass nutrient inputs in an Andean ecosystem
Published: 2023-05-30
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Animal carcass decomposition is an often-overlooked component of nutrient cycles. The importance of carcass decomposition for increasing nutrient availability has been demonstrated in several ecosystems, but impacts in arid lands are poorly understood. In a protected high desert landscape in Argentina, puma predation of vicuñas is a main driver of carcass distribution. Here, we sampled puma kill [...]
Breaking the Ice: A Review of Phages in Polar Ecosystems
Published: 2023-05-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology
Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that infect and replicate within bacterial hosts, playing a significant role in regulating microbial populations and ecosystem dynamics. However, phages from extreme environments such as polar regions remain relatively understudied due to challenges like restricted ecosystem access and low biomass. Understanding the diversity, structure, and functions of [...]
Social media records hold valuable information for conservation planning
Published: 2023-05-11
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Citizen science plays a crucial role in helping monitor biodiversity and inform conservation. With the widespread use of smartphones, many people share biodiversity information on social media, but this information is still not widely used in conservation. Here, focussing on Bangladesh - a tropical mega-diverse and mega-populated country, we examine the potential importance of social media [...]
Individualisation and Individualised Science: Integrating Disciplinary Perspectives
Published: 2023-05-05
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Economics, Medical Sciences, Philosophy, Psychology, Public Health, Sociology
Recent trends in a range of scientific fields have seen a shift towards research and methods concerning individual differences and individualisation. This article brings together various scientific disciplines—ecology, evolution, and animal behaviour; medicine and psychiatry; public health and sport/exercise science; sociology; psychology; economics and management—and conceptually integrates [...]
Beyond Darwin: General Theory of Evolution of Everything - From the origin of life to the market economy
Published: 2023-05-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The basic concern of the general theory of evolution is to understand the entire evolution from the origin of life to the biological, technological, social, and economic structures of the present from a unified point of view and structure. The general theory of evolution can be seen as a comprehensive generalization and extension of Darwin's theory of evolution. It goes far beyond [...]
Population decline reduces cooperative breeding in a spatially heterogenous population of superb fairy-wrens
Published: 2023-05-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
1. Reproductive performance in birds can be affected by both social environment and small-scale environmental heterogeneity via food abundance, availability of nesting sites, and predation risk. However, to date, the best studies of effects of microhabitat variation on avian populations have been on northern hemisphere passerines using nestboxes, where birds have limited control over nest sites [...]
Conservation macrogenetics
Published: 2023-04-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Genetic diversity is a core aspect of biodiversity that has been underrepresented in global conservation policy but is gaining rapidly increasing recognition. Conservation geneticists have traditionally focused on identifying, managing, and safeguarding the adaptive potential of specific populations or species. However, for almost all species, conservation relevant, population-level genetic data [...]
Bioremediation by Chlorella vulgaris: Potentials for Treatment of Municipal, Agricultural, and Industrial Wastewater Sources
Published: 2023-04-27
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Developing countries such as the Philippines suffer from a lack of policy development and implementation on wastewater treatment and discharge. Chlorella vulgaris is a microscopic green algae that has been employed in other countries for WWT due to its ability to simultaneously reduce pollutants and produce valuable biomass. However, challenges in technology adaptation such as differential [...]
Repeated evolution of extreme locomotor performance independent of changes in extended phenotype use in spiders
Published: 2023-04-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Many animals utilize self-built structures – so-called extended phenotypes – to enhance body functions, such as thermoregulation, prey capture or defence. Yet, it is unclear whether the evolution of animal constructions supplements or substitutes body functions. Here, using Austral brown spiders, we explored if the evolutionary loss and gain of silken webs as extended prey capture devices [...]
Interspecific behavioural interference and range dynamics: current insights and future directions
Published: 2023-04-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Novel biotic interactions in shifting communities play a key role in determining the ability of species’ ranges to track suitable habitat. To date, the impact of biotic interactions on range dynamics have predominantly been studied in the context of interactions between different trophic levels or, to a lesser extent, exploitative competition between species of the same trophic level. Yet, both [...]
Disentangling the effects of male-male competition, reproductive investment and social dominance on telomere length
Published: 2023-04-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Energetically costly events can accelerate telomere loss and ageing via oxidative damage. For adult males, increased levels of reproduction and more frequent fighting for access to mates are therefore stressful experiences that should hasten telomere shortening. Testing for these relationships is, however, confounded by potential correlations between social status and reproductive investment. We [...]
Killer prey: Pre-interaction ecology reverses bacterial predation
Published: 2023-04-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Ecological variation influences the character of many biotic interactions, but examples of predator-prey reversal mediated by abiotic context are few. We show that the temperature at which prey grow before interacting with a bacterial predator can determine the very direction of predation, reversing predator and prey identities. While Pseudomonas fluorescens reared at 32 °C was extensively killed [...]