Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Effects of helicopter skiing on mountain goats and woodland caribou in British Columbia
Published: 2022-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Helicopter skiing is a popular adventure tourism activity that occurs within the range of mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) and/or woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) in British Columbia and, to a lesser extent in adjacent jurisdictions. Both are species of concern, with known or suspected population declines occurring in substantial portions of their respective ranges. Whether [...]
Shared neural transcriptomic patterns underlie the repeated evolution of mutualistic cleaning behavior in Labridae wrasses
Published: 2022-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Despite the remarkable diversity of life forms on earth, evolutionary biologists have discovered numerous instances where even distantly related species share astonishing similarities in how they behave, look, and function. Given the importance of happenstance in evolution (e.g., random mutations, genetic drift, environmental stochasticity), it is often assumed that the mechanisms underlying such [...]
Effect of Forest Understorey Stand Density on Woodland Caribou Habitat Use
Published: 2022-07-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Woodland caribou are considered to preferentially use older forests that provide abundant terrestrial lichen forage and refuge from predators. However, structural characteristics vary widely, differing in terms of forage availability but also, perhaps, in the ability of caribou to move freely through forests to access the available forage or to escape predation. We examined the effect of forest [...]
Social manipulations trigger shifts in group-level dominance patterns
Published: 2022-07-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Recent computational approaches discovered group-level patterns within dominance hierarchies which are based on relative rank differences between individuals. Within species, groups could follow different dominance patterns, indicating these patterns could be group- rather than species-specific traits. Moreover, these patterns differ in complexity, with some requiring an individual to access more [...]
fundiversity: a modular R package to compute functional diversity indices
Published: 2022-07-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
1. Functional diversity is widely used and widespread. However, the main package used to compute functional diversity indices FD is not flexible and not adapted to the volume of data used in modern ecological analyses. 2. We here present fundiversity, an R package that eases the computation of classical functional diversity indices. It leverages parallelization and memoization (caching results [...]
Social niche shapes social behavior and cortisol concentrations during adolescence in female guinea pigs
Published: 2022-07-15
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Individualized social niches arise in social groups and are associated with behavior and hormone (e.g. cortisol) concentrations. During sensitive life phases, social interactions can have a profound impact on the development of social behavior. Focusing on adolescence, we aimed to investigate the relationship between the social niche, social behavior, and cortisol concentrations (baseline and [...]
The role of genomics in the future of Endangered Species Act decision-making
Published: 2022-07-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
The U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) provides a framework for the protection and recovery of threatened and endangered species and their habitats in the face of anthropogenic threats. Genetic information has played a role in decision-making under the ESA for decades, most commonly informing taxonomy and the designation of distinct population segments, though detection of inbreeding also played [...]
Jointly Modeling the Evolution of Discrete and Continuous Traits
Published: 2022-07-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Whether modeling the evolution of a discrete or continuous character, the focal trait of interest does not evolve in isolation and require comparative methods that model multivariate evolution. Progress along these lines has involved modeling multivariate evolution of the same class of character and there are fewer options when jointly modeling traits when one character is discrete and the other [...]
The brain’s bootstrapping problem and its consequences: Parental provisioning and variation in vertebrate brain sizes
Published: 2022-07-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Our understanding of the considerable variation in vertebrate brain size remains incomplete. Large brains are adaptive but brains require unusually high, near-constant energy inputs, and are prioritized energy targets. This trade-off also has understudied developmental consequences: immatures must develop a fully functional brain without already having one. We here propose that energy subsidies [...]
Herodotools: An R package to integrate macroevolution, community ecology, and biogeography
Published: 2022-07-05
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 [...]