Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
How Individualized Niches Arise: Defining Mechanisms of Niche Construction, Niche Choice, and Niche Conformance
Published: 2021-03-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Organisms interact with their environments in various ways. We present a conceptual framework that distinguishes three mechanisms of organism–environment interaction. We call these NC3 mechanisms: niche construction, in which individuals make changes to the environment; niche choice, in which individuals select an environment; and niche conformance, in which individuals adjust their phenotypes in [...]
Large-bodied birds are over-represented in unstructured citizen science data
Published: 2021-03-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Citizen science platforms are quickly accumulating hundreds of millions of biodiversity observations around the world annually. Quantifying and correcting for the biases in citizen science datasets remains an important first step before these data are used to address ecological questions and monitor biodiversity. One source of potential bias among datasets is the difference between those citizen [...]
Do macrophytes act as restaurants for fishes in tropical beaches? An approach using stomach content and prey availability analyses
Published: 2021-03-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Tropical sandy beaches have low primary productivity, thus depend on external food sources. Generally, allochthonous macrophytes, form the basis of these food webs, and also may influence factors such as fish’s abundance, richness, species composition, and biomass. However, the role of macrophytes to the feeding ecology of fishes in tropical sandy beaches is uncertain. We aim to explain if this [...]
Towards monitoring ecosystem integrity within the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework
Published: 2021-03-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Signatory countries to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are formulating indicators through 2030 under the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). These goals include increasing the integrity of natural ecosystems. However, the definition of integrity and methods for measuring it remain unspecified. Moreover, nations did not achieve their 2011-2020 CBD targets, partly due to [...]
Evidence of paternal effects on telomere length increases in early-life
Published: 2021-03-03
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Offspring of older parents in many species display decreased longevity, a faster ageing rate and lower fecundity than offspring born to younger parents. Biomarkers, such as telomeres, that tend to shorten as individual age, may provide insight into the mechanisms of parental age effects. Parental age could determine telomere length either through inheritance of shortened telomeres or through [...]
An assessment of statistical methods for non-independent data in ecological meta-analyses: Comment
Published: 2021-02-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Recently, Song et al. (2020) conducted a simulation study using different methods to deal with non-independence resulting from effect sizes originating from the same paper – a common occurrence in ecological meta-analyses. The main methods that were of interest in their simulations were: 1) a standard random-effects model used in combination with a weighted average effect size for each paper [...]
Microbial effects on plant phenology and fitness
Published: 2021-02-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Plant Sciences
Plant development and the timing of developmental events (phenology) are tightly coupled with plant fitness. A variety of internal and external factors determine the timing and fitness consequences of these life-history transitions. Microbes interact with plants throughout their life-history and impact host phenology. This review summarizes current mechanistic and theoretical knowledge [...]
Modeling complex biological systems: Tackling the parameter curse through evolution
Published: 2021-02-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Systems Biology
In this perspective paper we review a previously published evolutionary model of the lac-operon to argue and demonstrate the importance of using evolutionary methods to derive relevant parameters. We show that by doing so we can debug experimental and modeling artifacts.
Perspective: The evolutionary dangers of high COVID case counts
Published: 2021-02-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Virology
The recent simultaneous appearance of numerous highly contagious variants of SARS-CoV-2 demonstrate that the rate of adaptive evolution in the SARS-CoV-2 population is accelerating. It is no longer appropriate to focus only on epidemiological goals like flattening the curve and vaccinating to achieve herd immunity. We are now in a new phase of the pandemic, in which we must also focus on the [...]
A Roadmap Toward Predicting Species Interaction Networks (Across Space and Time)
Published: 2021-02-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Networks of species interactions underpin numerous ecosystem processes, but comprehensively sampling these interactions is difficult. Interactions intrinsically vary across space and time, and given the number of species that compose ecological communities, it can be tough to distinguish between a true negative (where two species never interact) from a false negative (where two species have not [...]
The origin of life: Oligomerization of RNA nucleotides on prebiotic Earth
Published: 2021-02-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
We propose a plausible oligomerization process of RNA nucleotides on prebiotic Earth. The process takes place at tideland and estuary where wet & dry cycle and pH fluctuation occur due to tide. The process proceeds with help of clay minerals that catalyze not only oligomerization but also cross complementary self-replication of RNA oligomers by lowering the activation energy of covalent [...]
Habitat shapes diversity of gut microbiomes in a wild population of blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus)
Published: 2021-02-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Microbiome constitutes and important axis of individual variation, affecting physiology and body condition via a number of pathways. Consequently, microbiome may be involved in ecological feedbacks, manifesting themselves as associations between microbiome characteristics and ecological factors experienced by individuals. In this study we report on the diversity and habitat dependence of [...]
Evolution of sexual development and sexual dimorphism in insects
Published: 2021-02-22
Subjects: Cell and Developmental Biology, Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Most animal species consist of two distinct sexes. At the morphological, physiological, and behavioural levels the differences between males and females are numerous and dramatic, yet at the genomic level they are often slight or absent. This disconnect is overcome because simple genetic differences or environmental signals are able to direct the sex-specific expression of a shared genome. A [...]
Ecological stoichiometry as a foundation for omics-enabled biogeochemical models of soil organic matter decomposition
Published: 2021-02-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Coupled biogeochemical cycles drive ecosystem ecology by influencing individual-to-community scale behaviors; yet the development of process-based models that accurately capture these dynamics remains elusive. Soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition in particular is influenced by resource stoichiometry that dictates microbial nutrient acquisition (‘ecological stoichiometry’). Despite its basis in [...]
Collection and analysis of a global marine phytoplankton primary production dataset
Published: 2021-02-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phytoplankton primary production is a key oceanographic process. It has intimate relationships with the marine food webs dynamics, the global carbon cycle and the Earth’s climate. The study of phytoplankton production on a global scale relies on indirect approaches due to the difficulties associated with field campaigns. On the other hand, modelling approaches require in situ data for both [...]