Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Husby, Reed & Visser - Demonstrating temperature induced phenological mismatch does not require negative effects on fitness or population growth: A comment on Samplonius et al.
Published: 2020-06-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
In a recent article Samplonius et al. (2020; preprint on EcoEvoRxiv, Version 1, Submitted 05, 2020 | Last edited: May 06, 2020) argue that there are “systematic weaknesses in the evidence for temperature mediated phenological mismatch”. While we appreciate their review of the literature on this topic and their call for a broadening of the taxonomic and geographic scope of mismatch research, their [...]
Potential effects of habitat fragmentation on wild animal welfare
Published: 2020-06-19
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences
The fragmentation of habitat has occurred throughout the history of life on Earth, but has been accelerated and magnified in scale over the past few centuries as a result of human industrial development. Habitat fragmentation affects the welfare of some wild animals directly, through the often violent processes that bring about fragmentation and by reducing the distance between them and the [...]
Do the ages of parents or helpers affect offspring fitness in a cooperatively breeding bird?
Published: 2020-06-16
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Age-related changes in either the phenotypes or genotypes of care-givers can impact juvenile performance. However, rarely in wild populations have germline and non-germline transgenerational effects of ageing been separately quantified. In cooperatively breeding animals, in addition to parental ages, the age of ‘helpers’ attending the nest may also impact juvenile performance. Using a wild [...]
Phylogeny can Inform Animal Model Development for Both Inherited and Induced Conditions: Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) and Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD)
Published: 2020-06-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The use of animal models in research on human and veterinary diseases and disorders is retracting, though it is likely to remain critical for decades. In light of increasing regulation and expectations of judicious use of animal subjects, we examine the idea that the use of animal models can be guided by phylogenetic relationships and modern evolutionary and cladistic analyses. Given that [...]
Potential long-distance dispersal of freshwater diatoms adhering to waterfowl plumage
Published: 2020-06-02
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Waterfowl are potential long-distance dispersal vectors for aquatic microbes such as diatoms, but supporting empirical data are scarce, especially concerning external transport on feathers. 2. We conducted an experiment designed to partially emulate diatom dispersal via adherence to waterfowl, and to evaluate the effects of relative humidity (RH) and exposure time on viability. We dipped [...]
A guide to using the Internet to monitor and quantify the wildlife trade
Published: 2020-05-28
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
The unrivalled growth in e-commerce of animals and plants presents an unprecedented opportunity to monitor wildlife trade to inform conservation, biosecurity, and law enforcement. Using the Internet to quantify the scale of the wildlife trade (volume, frequency) is a relatively recent and rapidly developing approach, which currently lacks an accessible framework for locating relevant websites and [...]
Local landscape position impacts demographic rates in a widespread North American steppe bunchgrass
Published: 2020-05-28
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
[this article now published at Ecosphere: https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.3351] Understanding the environmental drivers of demographic rates and population dynamics over space and time is critical for anticipating how species will respond to climate change. While the influence of temporal environmental variation and large environmental gradients are well recognized, less is known about how local [...]
Crowdsourcing global perspectives in ecology using social media
Published: 2020-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Transparent, open, and reproducible research is still far from routine, and the full potential of open science has not yet been realized. Crowdsourcing––defined as the usage of a flexible open call to a heterogeneous group of individuals to recruit volunteers for a task ––is an emerging scientific model that encourages larger and more outwardly transparent collaborations. While crowdsourcing, [...]
Fieldwork in landscape ecology
Published: 2020-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Fieldwork has played a critical role in the development of landscape ecology, and it remains essential for addressing contemporary challenges such as understanding the landscape ecology of global change. Advances in technology have expanded the scope of fieldwork to include the deployment of drones and other sensors, and in recent years, researchers have expressed concerns that traditional [...]
Why spatial scale matters in predicting synchrony of ecological disruption
Published: 2020-05-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Arising from: C. Trisos et al. Nature 580, 496–501, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2189-9 (2020). ABSTRACT The fundamental assumption behind this provocative study (Trisos et al. 2020) is that current and future climatic tolerance limits for a species can be inferred from the last 170 years of climate records within its current distribution. Using this approach, the authors project the [...]
Climate change as a catalyst of social evolution
Published: 2020-05-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Anthropogenic climatic change will be a major factor shaping natural populations over the foreseeable future. The scope of this issue has spawned the integrative field of global change biology, which is chiefly concerned with identifying vulnerabilities of natural systems to climate change and integrating these into models of biodiversity loss. Meanwhile, there remains considerable latitude for [...]
Mapping the past, present and future research landscape of paternal effects
Published: 2020-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Medicine and Health Sciences, Physiology
Although in all sexually reproducing organisms, an individual has a mother and a father, non-genetic inheritance has been predominantly studied in mothers. Paternal effects have been far less frequently studied, until recently. In the last five years, research on environmentally induced paternal effects has grown rapidly in the number of publications and diversity of topics. Motivations for [...]
Assessing Raspberry Shake and Boom sensors for recording African elephant acoustic vocalizations
Published: 2020-05-07
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
In this work we assess the performance of the Raspberry Shake and Boom (RS&B) sensor package for detecting and monitoring African elephants (Loxodonta africana). This is the first documented test of this particular unit for recording animal behaviour; the unit was originally designed for detecting tectonic earthquakes and low frequency (<50 Hz) atmospheric acoustics. During a four day [...]
Strengthening the evidence base for temperature-mediated phenological asynchrony and its impacts
Published: 2020-05-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Climate warming has caused the seasonal timing of many components of ecological food chains to advance (Thackeray et al. 2010, 2016). Differential shifts lead to phenological asynchrony, often referred to as trophic mismatch when it is detrimental for consumers (Cushing 1990). In the context of trophic interactions, it has been suggested that consumers will shift their phenology to adapt to [...]
Trophic cascades and connectivity in coastal benthic marine ecosystems: a meta-analysis of experimental and observational research
Published: 2020-05-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Predators often exert top-down control on lower trophic levels, such that their removal or addition can trigger trophic cascades. Despite coastal ecosystems containing well known trophic cascades, the abiotic and biotic factors governing the occurrence and strength of these cascades are still unclear. We worked to explain the variability of trophic cascades in benthic marine ecosystems by [...]