Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Maternal and paternal age effects on male antler flies: a field experiment
Published: 2021-11-11
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
In many species, parental age at reproduction can influence offspring performance and lifespan, but the direction of these effects and the traits affected vary among studies. Data on parental age effects are still scarce in non-captive populations, especially insects, despite species such as fruit flies being models in laboratory-based aging research. We performed a biologically relevant [...]
Unexpected global patterns in plant vulnerability to climate change
Published: 2021-11-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Understanding how species will respond to climate change is critically important for managing our ecosystems into the future. However, surprisingly little is known about the distribution of risk based on the actual thermal tolerances of species, especially plants. We used germination records from 776 species to provide a global map of plant warming risk – the difference between maximum [...]
Thermal plasticity in behavioural traits mediates mating and reproductive dynamics in an ectotherm
Published: 2021-11-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Global changes in temperature potentially influence sexual selection by restricting opportunities for activity. However, explicit tests of the behavioural mechanisms linking thermal variation to mating and reproductive performance are rare. We address this gap in a temperate lizard by combining social network analysis with molecular pedigree reconstruction in a large-scale thermal manipulation [...]
Potential survival of some, but not all, diversification methods
Published: 2021-11-06
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Models have long been used for understanding changing diversification patterns over time. The rediscovery that models with very different rates through time can fit a phylogeny equally well has led to great concern about the use of these models. We share and add to these concerns: even with time heterogeneous models without these issues, the distribution of the data means that estimates will be [...]
Promoting scientific literacy in Evolution through citizen science
Published: 2021-11-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Evolutionary understanding is central to biology as a whole. It is also an essential prerequisite to understanding issues in everyday life, such as advances in medicine and global challenges like climate change. Yet, evolution is generally poorly understood by civil society and many misconceptions exist. Citizen science, which has been increasing in popularity as a means to gather new data and [...]
Inferring the history of hybridization: A case study in Iochrominae (Solanaceae)
Published: 2021-10-31
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
This paper tests multiple methods for detecting and localizing hybrids in the genus Iochroma (Solanaceae). We created a series of datasets varying in the amount of expected hybridization, and we included both natural hybrids and a positive control (an artificial hybrid). We found that adding hybrids to the dataset markedly increased discordance and decreased tree certainty, as predicted. [...]
Low statistical power and overestimated anthropogenic impacts, exacerbated by publication bias, dominate field studies in global change biology
Published: 2021-10-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Field studies are essential to reliably quantify ecological responses to global change because they are exposed to realistic climate manipulations. Yet such studies are limited in replicates, resulting in less power and, therefore, unreliable effect estimates. Further, while manipulative field experiments are assumed to be more powerful than non-manipulative observations, it has rarely been [...]
A protocol for reproducible functional diversity analyses
Published: 2021-10-27
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The widespread use of species traits to infer community assembly mechanisms or to link species to ecosystem functions has led to an exponential increase in functional diversity analyses, with >10,000 papers published in 2010–2019, and >1,500 papers only in 2020. This interest is reflected in the development of a multitude of theoretical and methodological frameworks for calculating [...]
Data rescue: saving environmental data from extinction
Published: 2021-10-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Historical and long-term environmental datasets are imperative to understanding how natural systems respond to our changing world. Although immensely valuable, these data are at risk of being lost unless actively curated and archived on data repositories. The practice of data rescue, which we define as identifying, preserving, and sharing valuable data and associated metadata at risk of loss, is [...]
Mexican agricultural frontier communities differ in forest dynamics with consequences for conservation and restoration
Published: 2021-10-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Forest regrowth is key to achieve restoration commitments, but a general lack of understanding when it occurs and how long secondary forests persist, hampers effective upscaling. We quantified spatiotemporal forest dynamics in a recently colonized agricultural frontier in southern Mexico, and tested how temporal variation in climate, and cross-community variation in land ownership, land quality [...]
Mobbing in animals: a thorough review and proposed future directions
Published: 2021-10-26
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Communication, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Mobbing is an important anti-predator behavior where prey harass and attack a predator to lower the immediate and long-term risk posed by predators, warn others, and communicate about the predator’s threat. While this behavior has been of interest to humans since antiquity, and aspects of it have been well researched for the past 50 years, we still know little about its ecology and the [...]
Sex-dependent effects of parental age on offspring fitness in a cooperatively breeding bird
Published: 2021-10-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Parental age can have considerable effects on offspring phenotypes and health. However, intergenerational effects may also have longer-term effects on offspring fitness. Few studies have investigated parental age effects on offspring fitness in natural populations while also testing for sex- and environment-specific effects. Further, longitudinal parental age effects may be masked by [...]
Sperm-dependent asexual species matter in ecology and evolution
Published: 2021-10-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
In a world of metazoans, where sexual reproduction vastly predominates, asexual organisms are nonetheless very important. The aim of this review is to show that asexuals can have general effects on other species, ecosystems and biological networks via mechanisms that deserve more attention. These include 1) impact on the genepool of coexisting sexual species by either restricting their population [...]
Arboreal locomotion and trophic security at the dawn of Euprimate vision
Published: 2021-10-23
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology
Primate vision is thought to have evolved in connection with life in the trees. However, several inter-related origins theories—those addressing possible co-evolution with size, predation, diet, daylight, locomotion, and groups—also provide reasonable explanations of their distinct cranial-visual morphology. We hypothesized that demand for high-speed landings in arboreal environments facilitated [...]
Genetic variation in non-structural carbohydrates in Plantago lanceolata is related to mowing intensity but not to regrowth ability
Published: 2021-10-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs) are important storage reserves of plants, and they may play a key role in the plants’ ability to recover from disturbance events such as drought, fire, or biomass removal. In managed grasslands, plants regularly experience aboveground biomass removal by grazing or mowing. If NSCs influence plant tolerances to these damages, then land-use intensification could [...]