Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Effects of wave-driven water flow on the fast-start escape response of juvenile coral reef damselfishes
Published: 2021-03-26
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Fish often evade predators with a fast-start escape response. Studies typically examine this behaviour in still water despite water motion being an inherent feature of aquatic ecosystems. In shallow habitats, waves create complex flows that likely influence escape performance, particularly in small fishes with low absolute swimming speeds relative to environmental flows. I examined how [...]
Applying conservation reserve design strategies to define ecosystem monitoring priorities
Published: 2021-03-25
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In an era of unprecedented ecological upheaval, accurately monitoring ecosystem change at large spatial scales and over long-time frames is an essential to effective environmental management and conservation. However, economic limitations often preclude revisiting entire monitoring networks at a high enough frequency to accurately detect ecological changes. Thus, a prioritisation strategy is [...]
Early predation risk shapes adult learning and cognitive flexibility
Published: 2021-03-25
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Predation risk during early ontogeny can impact developmental trajectories and permanently alter adult phenotypes. Such phenotypic plasticity often leads to adaptive changes in traits involved in anti-predator responses. While plastic changes in cognition may increase survival, it remains unclear whether early predation experience shapes cognitive investment and drives developmental plasticity in [...]
Report of programming bugs in the DAISIE R package: consequences and correction
Published: 2021-03-24
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
DAISIE (Dynamic Assembly of Islands through Speciation, Immigration and Extinction) is a framework for a dynamic stochastic model of island biogeography that can be used to estimate the rates of colonisation, speciation and extinction (CES rates) from phylogenetic trees of insular communities by maximum likelihood, and to simulate such data sets given a set of rates. The framework is available in [...]
Effects of male and female personality on sexual cannibalism in the Springbok mantis
Published: 2021-03-24
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Behaviours that are consistent across contexts (also known as behavioural syndromes) can have evolutionary implications, but their role in scenarios where the sexes conflict, such as sexual cannibalism, is poorly understood. The aggressive spillover hypothesis proposes that cannibalistic attacks during adulthood may depend on female aggressiveness during earlier developmental stages, but evidence [...]
Global maps of soil temperature
Published: 2021-03-22
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids thus fail to reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions are controlled and most terrestrial species reside. Here we provide global maps of soil [...]
Estimating (non)linear selection on reaction norms: A general framework for labile traits
Published: 2021-03-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Individual reaction norms describe how labile phenotypes vary as a function of organisms’ expected trait values (intercepts) and plasticity across environments (slopes), as well as their degree of stochastic phenotypic variability or predictability (residuals). These reaction norms can be estimated empirically using multilevel, mixed-effects models and play a key role in ecological research on a [...]
Evolvability and the Fossil Record
Published: 2021-03-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The concept of evolvability—the capacity of a population to produce and maintain evolutionarily relevant variation—has become increasingly prominent in evolutionary biology. Although paleontology has a long history of investigating questions of evolvability, often invoking different but allied terminology, the study of evolvability in the fossil record has seemed intrinsically problematic. How [...]
Temporal Change Detection Analysis of Monroe County, NY tree cover from 2009 to 2017
Published: 2021-03-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Forests provide many ecosystem services which are enjoyed by nearby residing communities. This includes pollution and flood mitigation, carbon sequestration, oxygen production, food, fuel, education, recreation, and aesthetics. These ecosystem services also come from urban and suburban forests. Urban ecosystems, specifically urban green spaces services have been noted to improve human health [...]
Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model
Published: 2021-03-14
Subjects: Anthropology, Archaeological Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biological Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Many researchers assume that until 10-12,000 years ago, humans lived in small, mobile, relatively egalitarian bands composed mostly of kin. This “nomadic-egalitarian model” informs evolutionary explanations of behavior and our understanding of how contemporary societies differ from those of our evolutionary past. Here, we synthesize research challenging this model and propose an alternative, the [...]
Climate change and plant reproduction: trends and drivers of mast seeding change
Published: 2021-03-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Climate change is reshaping global vegetation through its impacts on plant mortality, but recruitment creates the next generation of plants and will determine the structure and composition of future communities. Recruitment depends on mean seed production, but also on the interannual variability and among-plant synchrony in seed production, the phenomenon known as mast seeding. Thus, predicting [...]
Repeatability of endocrine traits and dominance rank in female guinea pigs
Published: 2021-03-11
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology
Background Glucocorticoids (e.g. cortisol) are associated with variation in social behavior, and previous studies have linked baseline as well as challenge-induced glucocorticoid concentrations to dominance status. It is known that cortisol response to an acute challenge is repeatable and correlates to social behavior in males of many mammal species. However, it is unclear whether these patterns [...]
Once an Optimist, Always an Optimist? Studying Cognitive Judgment Bias in Mice
Published: 2021-03-11
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Individuals differ in the way they judge ambiguous information: some individuals interpret ambiguous information in a more optimistic, and others in a more pessimistic way. Over the past two decades, such “optimistic” and “pessimistic” cognitive judgment biases (CJBs) have been utilized in animal welfare science as indicators of animals’ emotional states. However, empirical studies on their [...]
Capitalizing on opportunistic citizen science data to monitor urban biodiversity: a multi-taxa framework
Published: 2021-03-09
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Monitoring urban biodiversity is increasingly important, given the increasing anthropogenic pressures on biodiversity in urban areas. While the cost of broad-scale monitoring by professionals may be prohibitive, citizen science (also referred to as community science) will likely play an important role in understanding biodiversity responses to urbanization into the future. Here, we present a [...]
Deploying Ecological Countermeasures as a Biosecurity Imperative
Published: 2021-03-09
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Immunology of Infectious Disease, Immunopathology, International Public Health, Life Sciences, Maternal and Child Health, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Immunology and Infectious Disease, Population Biology, Public Health, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Veterinary Infectious Diseases, Veterinary Medicine, Veterinary Microbiology and Immunobiology, Veterinary Pathology and Pathobiology, Zoology
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought biosecurity to the forefront of national security policy. Land use change is a fundamental driver of zoonotic disease outbreaks, yet substantial study is yet required to unravel the mechanisms by which land use-induced spillover operates. Ecological degradation may be the 21st Century’s most overlooked security threat. Within the biosecurity context, we introduce [...]