Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Encounter behaviour shapes ecological distributions
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecology’s foundational models keep only the first moment of the stochastic distributions of encounters. Yet, encounter behaviour (how animals search, aggregate, hide and move) sets the whole distributional shape: zeros, variance, skew and, where particular behaviours build them, heavy tails. That shape decides vital rates, persistence and spatial pattern, because the rates involved are [...]
Does female personality drive mate preference and reproduction in wild house mice?
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Comparative Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social Psychology
Personality, consistent individual behavioural variation, shapes how individuals move and engage with their socioecological environment, potentially influencing how they assess and choose mates. This makes personality a potential target of sexual selection. Indeed, personality is linked to partner choice, pair formation and mating outcomes in both human and non-human animals. However, it remains [...]
Amphibians and reptiles in bird nests and bird-excavated cavities: a mini review
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Bird nests and bird-excavated cavities provide suitable environments for egg incubation and nestling development. However, bird-created structures are also exploited by a wide range of organisms, including taxa that are phylogenetically distant from the avian constructors. While birds, mammals, and invertebrates are well documented as secondary users of nests and cavities, the occurrence of [...]
Pine wilt disease as a holobiont disorder: microbiome assembly as a potential management target
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Pathology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Pine wilt disease (PWD), caused by the pinewood nematode (PWN) Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, continues to expand globally despite decades of pathogen-focused management. Here, we propose that disruption of microbiome assembly within the pine holobiont may contribute to disease progression and help explain variation in disease outcomes and responses to microbial interventions. Drawing on recent [...]
Network structure and species connectivity drive asymmetric fitness outcomes in coevolving antagonistic communities
Published: 2026-10-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Antagonistic interactions are fundamental drivers of ecological community structure, generating strong reciprocal selective pressures that shape the evolution of functional traits across interacting species. Despite their ecological importance, the coevolutionary dynamics of antagonistic communities remain far less understood than those of mutualistic systems. Here, we develop a trait-based [...]
Reframing Mangroves as Socio-Ecological Coastal Infrastructure: Development and Application of a Six-Pillar Socio-Ecological Infrastructure Framework
Published: 2026-10-05
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Forest Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Mangrove ecosystems are critical components of coastal socio-ecological systems, providing shoreline protection, biodiversity support, carbon sequestration, and livelihood opportunities for coastal communities. However, increasing pressures from climate change, coastal development, and environmental degradation threaten their resilience and long-term sustainability. This study proposes a [...]
Plasticity Decay and Attenuated Recovery (PDAR): A Hybrid Dynamical Model for the Historical Accessibility of Evolutionary Space
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The evolutionary history of life is marked by a pronounced temporal asymmetry: an early, disproportionate generation of major morphological novelty, followed by extensive taxonomic diversification that does not appear to be accompanied by comparable expansion of morphological disparity. This paper develops a minimal hybrid dynamical model, termed Plasticity Decay and Attenuated Recovery (PDAR), [...]
Weak and species-specific morphological change in Atlantic Forest birds across two decades of warming
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Birds are widely expected to shrink as the climate warms, but few tropical studies span decades. In the central Amazon, mean body mass fell in all 77 species studied and a third of species lengthened their wings. We analysed 24 years (1995–2018) of morphology from 73 passerine species (12,571 live-capture records; ATLANTIC BIRD TRAITS) across the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, a region that warmed by [...]
Climate vulnerability assessment framework choice influences species prioritization and prediction of population decline
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Climate change vulnerability assessments (CCVAs) are regarded as an essential strategy to conservation strategies but are rarely used to inform conservation planning and prioritize species for management and adaptation. The main factor inhibiting its use is the challenge of combining exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive-capacity variables and, especially, of evaluating the ability of frameworks to [...]
What, if anything, can studies of adaptation to altitude reveal about responses to climate change?
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding the impacts of global climate change on biodiversity is critical to its conservation. Existing frameworks within evolutionary biology can help us predict whether, and under what conditions, adaptation may be a sufficient means for population persistance in a changing environment. Here, we consider the relevance of mountain ranges as natural systems for studying this process. [...]
Diurnal temperature fluctuations outweigh population origin in shaping thermal performance and range predictions in European Aedes albopictus
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Predicting invasive ectotherm responses to climate change requires understanding how population-level variation and diurnal temperature fluctuations shape thermal performance, and whether constant-temperature measurements accurately capture performance under fluctuating conditions. Yet many models, including those used to predict mosquito distribution and disease transmission, still rely on [...]
Genomic repetition in climate adaptation across different crop species
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Commercial crop varieties (cultivars) have a narrow genetic diversity that makes them vulnerable to climate change. Yet most crops have related semi-domesticated varieties (landraces) and wild relatives that thrive under climates that would be considered extreme for cultivars. The genomes of such varieties are reservoirs of unknown adaptive traits, some of which could be used to extend the [...]
Nonlinear survey-effort adjustment removes the reported bird-diversity effect
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A recent study published in Science reported that greater photovoltaic policy stringency (PSI) was associated with lower Shannon diversity, lower Simpson diversity, lower species richness, and slightly higher species evenness in China. We exactly reproduced their published model and then evaluated seven alternative survey-effort specifications across Richness, Shannon diversity, Simpson [...]
Amplexus Takeover in the Asian Common Toad, Duttaphrynus melanostictus, in Dumka, Jharkhand, India
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
I report an instance of amplexus takeover in the Asian Common Toad, Duttaphrynus melanostictus, observed at Simardhuma village, Dumka District, Jharkhand, India, on 21 July 2025. Over an 18-minute sequence, a second male repeatedly interfered with an amplectant pair until the amplectant male released the female, after which the second male assumed amplexus. Although male replacement is known [...]
Toward a General Theory of Heteromorphic Reproduction
Published: 2026-09-30
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Organisms often divide reproductive investment among outputs that differ in morphology, timing, or reproductive mechanism. In this paper I extend the minimum-risk treatment of seed heteromorphism to the more general question of organisms with ‘portfolios’ of biologically distinct reproductive outputs. The resulting framework specifies a common investment and fitness currency, calculates returns [...]