Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Herodotools: An R package to integrate macroevolution, community ecology, and biogeography
Published: 2022-07-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Aim: Historical processes like speciation, extinction, and historical dispersal are the ultimate factors generating and maintaining biodiversity in space and time. While detecting the effect of those processes on the distribution of biodiversity has great relevance by itself, how to measure them is critical to interpreting the underlying causes of biological patterns. However, metrics of [...]
Methodological inconsistencies define thermal bottlenecks in fish life cycle: a comment on Dahlke et al. 2020
Published: 2022-07-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Comparative analyses require researchers to not only ensure data quality, but also to make prudent and justifiable assumptions about data comparability. A failure to do so can lead to unreliable conclusions. As a case in point, we comment on a study that estimated the vulnerability of the world’s fish species to climate change using comparison between life stages (Dahlke et al. 2020, Science 369: [...]
When bacteria are phage playgrounds: interactions between viruses, cells and mobile genetic elements
Published: 2022-07-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Studies of viral adaptation have focused on the selective pressures imposed by hosts. However, there is increasing evidence that interactions between viruses, cells, and other mobile genetic elements (MGEs) are determinant to the success of infections. These interactions are often associated with antagonism and competition, but sometimes involve cooperation or parasitism. They involve mechanism [...]
The coevolutionary mosaic of bat betacoronavirus emergence risk
Published: 2022-07-01
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Biotechnology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
Pathogen evolution is one of the least predictable components of disease emergence, particularly in nature. Here, building on principles established by the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution, we develop a quantitative, spatially-explicit framework for mapping the evolutionary risk of viral emergence. Driven by interest in diseases like SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, we examine the global [...]
PHENOTYPIC PLASTICITY MADE SIMPLE, BUT NOT TOO SIMPLE
Published: 2022-06-29
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Phenotypic plasticity refers to environment-dependent trait expression (Dewitt and Scheiner, 2004). Knowledge of phenotypic plasticity is important in virtually all areas of basic and applied biology. Researchers in applied fields (such as agriculture, medicine, public health, wildlife management, and conservation biology) have a vested interest in knowing how traits are or will be expressed [...]
Ecological networks of an Antarctic ecosystem: a full description of non-trophic interactions
Published: 2022-06-29
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Interactions between organisms are very diverse and attend to multiple biological demands, hence understanding ecological communities requires considering different types of species interactions beyond predation. In this work, we assemble for the first time the non-trophic networks of an Antarctic ecosystem. We report mutualistic (+/+), competitive (-/-), commensalistic (+/0) and amensalistic [...]
The community-function landscape of microbial consortia
Published: 2022-06-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Quantitatively and predictively linking the composition and function of microbial communities is a major aspiration of microbial ecology. It is also a critical step in the path toward engineering synthetic consortia and manipulating natural microbiomes. The functions of microbial communities are collective properties that emerge from a complex web of molecular interactions between individual [...]
A simple conceptual framework and nomenclature for studying repeated, parallel and convergent evolution
Published: 2022-06-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Parallel and convergent evolution are textbook examples of the role of natural selection in evolution. However, these terms are used interchangeably, and sometimes with conflicting meanings. This has resulted in confusion, which hampers the understanding of the processes underlying these important forms of evolution. In this synthesis, I discuss the issues with current definitions of parallel, [...]
Dispersal and space use of captive-reared and wild-rehabilitated Harpy Eagles released in Central American landscapes: Implications for reintroduction and reinforcement management
Published: 2022-06-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Understanding the spatial context of animal movements is fundamental for establishment and management of protected areas (PA). However, these data are not readily available for large raptors, particularly for tropical species. We telemetry-tracked 36 captive-reared and wild-rehabilitated Harpia harpyja and estimated dispersal and space use after release in Mesoamerica. We evaluated the [...]
An operational workflow for producing periodic estimates of species occupancy at large scales
Published: 2022-06-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Policy makers require high-level summaries of biodiversity change. However, deriving such summaries from raw biodiversity data is a complex process involving several intermediary stages. In this paper, we describe a workflow for generating annual estimates of species’ occupancy at national scales from raw species occurrence data, which can be used to construct a range of policy-relevant [...]
The effect of experimental hybridization on cognition and brain anatomy: limited phenotypic variation and transgression in Poeciliidae
Published: 2022-06-23
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Hybridization can promote phenotypic variation and often produces trait combinations distinct from the parental species. This increase in available variation can lead to the manifestation of functional novelty when new phenotypes bear adaptive value under the environmental conditions in which they occur. While the role of hybridization as a driver of variation and novelty in traits linked to [...]
Scaling up and down: movement ecology for microorganisms
Published: 2022-06-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Movement is critical for the fitness of organisms, both large and small. It dictates how individuals acquire resources, evade predators, exchange genetic material, and respond to stressful environments. Movement also influences ecological and evolutionary dynamics at scales beyond the individual organism. However, the links between individual motility and the processes that generate and maintain [...]
The vocal apparatus of bats: an understudied tool to reconstruct the evolutionary history of echolocation?
Published: 2022-06-12
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Zoology
Until recently, bat phylogeny separated megabats (laryngeally non-echolocators) and microbats (all laryngeal echolocators) into two distinct clades. This segregation was consistent with the assumption that laryngeal echolocation was acquired by a common ancestor and inherited by all microchiropterans. Thus, laryngeal echolocation was regarded to have evolved once. Recent advances in bat genome [...]
Micro-evolutionary response of spring migration timing in a wild seabird
Published: 2022-06-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Understanding the mechanisms by which populations can adapt to changing environmental conditions is crucial for predicting their viability. In the context of rapid climate change, phenological advance is a key adaptation for which evidence is accumulating across taxa. Among vertebrates, phenotypic plasticity is known to underlie most of this phenological change, while evidence for micro-evolution [...]
EvoPhylo: an R package for pre- and postprocessing of morphological data from relaxed clock Bayesian phylogenetics
Published: 2022-06-06
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
1. Relaxed clock Bayesian evolutionary inference (BEI) enables the co-estimation of phylogenetic trees and evolutionary parameters associated with models of character and lineage evolution. Fast advances in new model developments over the past decade have boosted BEI as a major macroevolutionary analytical framework using morphological and/or molecular data across vastly different study systems. [...]