Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Assembly processes lead to divergent soil fungal communities within and among twelve forest ecosystems along a latitudinal gradient
Published: 2021-01-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
- Latitudinal gradients provide opportunities to better understand soil fungal community assembly and its relationship with vegetation, climate, soil and ecosystem function. Understanding the mechanisms underlying community assembly is essential for predicting compositional responses to changing environments. - We quantified the relative importance of stochastic and deterministic processes in [...]
Hardwood content impacts the parasitoid community associated with Eastern spruce budworm (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae)
Published: 2021-01-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
A major pest of eastern North American forests is spruce budworm, Choristoneura fumiferana Clemens (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae), which outbreaks every 30–40 years and causes large scale tree mortality. Researchers have established that hardwood content reduces the defoliation and mortality of balsam fir and spruces during spruce budworm outbreaks. One mechanism posited to explain these patterns is [...]
Early-life seasonal, weather and social effects on telomere length in a wild mammal
Published: 2021-01-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Early-life environmental conditions can provide a source of individual variation in life-history strategies and senescence patterns. Conditions experienced in early life can be quantified by measuring telomere length, which can act as a biomarker of survival probability. Here, we investigate whether seasonal changes, weather conditions, and group size are associated with early-life and/or [...]
Condition-transfer maternal effects modulate sexual conflict
Published: 2021-01-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Strong sexual selection frequently favours males that increase their reproductive success by harming females, with potentially negative consequences for population growth. Understanding what factors modulate conflict between the sexes is hence critical to understand both the evolution of male and female phenotypes and the viability of populations in the wild. Here, we model the evolution of male [...]
Re-understanding evolution: the Information Continuum Model
Published: 2021-01-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Evolution is contingent on inherited information shaped by natural selection. Few biologists familiar with evolution would object to this description. This apparent consensus could be taken to indicate agreement on the forces shaping evolution, but vivid discussions reveal profound divergences on how evolution is perceived. The predominant paradigm of the Modern Synthesis (MS) holds the position [...]
Mate-guarding duration is mainly influenced by the risk of sperm competition and not by female quality in a golden orb-weaver spider
Published: 2021-01-06
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Males are expected to mate with as many females as possible, but can maximize their reproductive success through strategic mating decisions. For instance, males can increase their own fitness by mating with high quality females that produce more offspring. Additionally, males can adjust mating effort based on the relative distribution of females and male competitors. To test factors that [...]
Collecting eco-evolutionary data in the dark: Impediments to subterranean research and how to overcome them
Published: 2020-12-23
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
(1) Caves and other subterranean habitats fulfill the requirements of experimental model systems to address general questions in ecology and evolution. Yet, the harsh working conditions of these environments and the uniqueness of the subterranean organisms have challenged most attempts to pursuit standardized research (2) Two main obstacles have synergistically hampered previous attempts. First, [...]
Challenges and opportunities of species distribution modelling of terrestrial arthropod predators
Published: 2020-12-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Species distribution models (SDMs) are emerging as essential tools in the equipment of many ecologists; they are useful in exploring species distributions in space and time and in answering an assortment of questions related to historical biogeography, climate change biology and conservation biology. Given that arthropod distributions are strongly influenced by microclimatic conditions and [...]
Population divergence in aggregation and sheltering behaviour in surface and cave-adapted Asellus aquaticus (Crustacea: Isopoda)
Published: 2020-12-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Aggregation (gathering together) and sheltering (hiding in cover) are basic behaviours that might reduce the risk of predation. However, both behaviours have costs, like increased competition over resources and high prevalence of contact-spread parasites (aggregation) or lost opportunities for foraging and mating (sheltering). Therefore, adaptive variation in these behaviours is expected between [...]
Lets talk about sex: what influences researchers’ perceptions of sex differences in animal behaviour?
Published: 2020-12-18
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The traditional theory of sexual selection posits the idea of sex roles: females should be choosy and caring, while males should be competitive and promiscuous. Despite criticism of these stereotypes from some evolutionary biologists, sex roles still appear as a norm in the literature. This may be because scientists anthropomorphize animal behaviours, which raises the question of whether human [...]
Computer vision, machine learning, and the promise of phenomics in ecology and evolutionary biology
Published: 2020-12-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
For centuries, ecologists and evolutionary biologists have used images such as drawings, paintings and photographs to record and quantify the shapes and patterns of life. With the advent of digital imaging, biologists continue to collect image data at an ever-increasing rate. This immense body of data provides insight into a wide range of biological phenomena, including phenotypic trait [...]
Large contribution of recent photosynthate to soil respiration in Dipterocarpaceae-dominated tropical forest revealed by girdling
Published: 2020-12-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
• Tropical forests are the most productive terrestrial ecosystem, fixing around 41 Pg of carbon from the atmosphere each year. A substantial portion of this carbon is allocated belowground to roots and root-associated microorganisms. However, there have been very few empirical studies on the dynamics of this transfer, especially in tropical forests where the response is mediated by high plant [...]
Visual and olfactory cues of predation affect body and brain growth in the guppy
Published: 2020-12-15
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
1. Phenotypic plasticity requires animals to acquire reliable environmental information. When multiple sources of information agree, cues should be perceived as reliable and induce a relatively strong response. Conversely, where stimuli conflict, animals must weigh the accuracy of the sources of information and responses should be reduced. 2. Availability of reliable information is often [...]
Beta and phylogenetic diversities tell complementary stories about ecological networks biogeography
Published: 2020-12-12
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The beta-diversity of interactions between communities does not necessarily correspond to the differences related to their species composition because interactions show greater variability than species co-occurrence. Additionally, the structure of species interaction networks can itself vary over spatial gradients, thereby adding constraints on the dissimilarity of communities in space. We used [...]
Concepts and applications in functional diversity
Published: 2020-12-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The use of functional analyses in ecology has grown exponentially over the past two decades, broadening our understanding of biological diversity and its change across space and time. Virtually all ecological sub-disciplines recognize the critical value of looking at species and communities from a functional perspective, and this has led to a proliferation of methods for estimating contrasting [...]