Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The evolutionary relevance of social learning and transmission of behaviors in non-social arthropods
Published: 2021-08-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Research on social learning has centered around vertebrates, but evidence is accumulating that small-brained, non-social arthropods also learn from others. Social learning can lead to social inheritance when socially acquired behaviors are transmitted to subsequent generations. Here, we first highlight the complementarities between social and classical genetic inheritance, using oviposition site [...]
Simultaneous effect of habitat remnancy, exotic species and anthropogenic disturbance on orchid diversity and abundance
Published: 2021-08-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Orchids are potentially useful as ecological indicators because of their sensitivity to habitat fragmentation and anthropogenic disturbance. While many studies explore the effect of single factors on orchid diversity, few investigate how the extent, configuration and condition of surrounding habitat affect whole orchid communities. Here, we unravel the effect of biological invasions, [...]
Crumbling Island Keystones: Threat Diversity and Intensification on Islands Push Large Island Fruit Bats to the Brink
Published: 2021-07-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Large island fruit bats (LIFB), species of Pteropus, Acerodon, and related genera in the pteropodid subfamily Pteropodinae, are keystone species for island conservation in the Palaeotropics, playing critical roles as agents of dispersal and pollination of native island plant communities. This keystone role is crumbling because LIFB are collectively the most threatened group of bats in the world. [...]
Representation of global change drivers across biodiversity datasets
Published: 2021-07-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Global change has altered biodiversity and impacted ecosystem functions and services around the planet. Understanding the effects of anthropogenic drivers like human use and climate change on biodiversity change has become a key challenge for science and policy. However, our knowledge of biodiversity change is limited by the available data and their biases. Over land and sea, we test the [...]
Richard Lewontin (1929-2021): Evolutionary Biology’s Great Disrupter
Published: 2021-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
An appreciation of the career of the evolutionary biologist and activist Richard Lewontin (1929-2021)
Cryogenian glacial habitats as a plant terrestrialisation cradle – the origin of the anydrophytes and Zygnematophyceae split
Published: 2021-07-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
For tens of millions of years (Ma), the terrestrial habitats of Snowball Earth during the Cryogenian period (between 720 to 635 Ma before present – Neoproterozoic Era) were possibly dominated by global snow and ice cover up to the equatorial sublimative desert. The most recent time-calibrated phylogenies calibrated not only on plants but on a comprehensive set of eukaryotes indicate that within [...]
Roadkill in a time of pandemic: the analysis of wildlife-vehicle collisions reveals the differential impact of COVID-19 lockdown over mammal assemblages
Published: 2021-07-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Population Biology
Collisions with vehicles are a major anthropogenic cause of mortality for wildlife, with conservation and evolutionary implications. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries worldwide enforced lockdowns which importantly reduced traffic, and therefore had unprecedented consequences for global wildlife populations. We modeled how the two lockdown periods in spring and autumn 2020 influenced [...]
The ecology of wealth inequality in animal societies
Published: 2021-07-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Individuals vary in their access to resources, social connections, and phenotypic traits, and a central goal of evolutionary biology is to understand how this variation arises and influences fitness. Parallel research on humans has focused on the causes and consequences of variation in material possessions, opportunity, and health. Central to both fields of study is that unequal distribution of [...]
What do we mean by multicellularity? The Evolutionary Transitions Framework provides answers
Published: 2021-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The meaning of the word ‘multicellularity’ appears to be unambiguous – a concept that can be grasped with common sense. On closer inspection, however, there is notable disparity in the recent literature regarding the usage of the term ‘multicellularity’, which can describe complex organisms, simple microbial colonies or even multi-species biofilms. In addition, while emerging research directions, [...]
Explaining preemptive acclimation by linking information to plant phenotype
Published: 2021-07-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
We review mechanisms for preemptive acclimation in plants and propose a conceptual model linking developmental and evolutionary ecology with the acquisition of information through sensing of cues and signals. The idea is that plants acquire much of the information in the environment not from individual cues and signals but instead from their joint multivariate properties such as correlations. If [...]
Autocorrelation-informed home range estimation: a review and practical guide
Published: 2021-07-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Modern tracking devices allow for the collection of high-volume animal tracking data at improved sampling rates over VHF radiotelemetry. Home range estimation is a key output from these tracking datasets, but the inherent properties of animal movement can lead traditional statistical methods to under- or overestimate home range areas. 2. The Autocorrelated Kernel Density Estimation (AKDE) [...]
Flotsam and jetsam: a global review of the role of inputs of marine organic matter in sandy beach ecosystems
Published: 2021-07-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Sandy beaches are iconic interfaces that functionally link the ocean with the land by the flow of marine organic matter. These cross-ecosystem fluxes often comprise uprooted seagrass and dislodged macroalgae that can form substantial accumulations of detritus, termed ‘wrack’, on sandy beaches. In addition, the tissue of the carcasses of marine animals that regularly wash up on beaches form a rich [...]
Impact of Developmental Temperatures On The Repeatability of Thermal Plasticity in Metabolic Rate
Published: 2021-07-05
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Phenotypic plasticity is an important mechanism that allows populations to adjust to changing environments. Plastic responses induced by early life experiences can have lasting impacts on how individuals respond to environmental variation later in life (i.e., reversible plasticity). Developmental environments can also influence repeatability of plastic responses thereby altering the capacity for [...]
Re-examining extreme sleep duration in bats: implications for sleep phylogeny, ecology and function
Published: 2021-07-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology
Bats are quoted as sleeping for up to 20 hours a day, an example of extreme sleep duration amongst mammals. Given that duration is one of the primary metrics featured in comparative studies of sleep, it is important that determinations of species-specific sleep duration are well founded. Here, we summarise the evidence for the characterisation of bats as extreme sleepers and discuss whether it [...]
Plant herbivore protection by arbuscular mycorrhizas: A role for fungal diversity?
Published: 2021-07-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
The symbiotic association between arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi and terrestrial plants can enhance plant defences against insect herbivores. Despite advances in our understanding of how AM fungi affect plant tolerance and resistance based defence mechanisms, we contend that the role of fungal diversity in these interactions continues to be largely overlooked. This is problematic considering [...]