Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Responses to climate change – insights and limitations from herbaceous plant model systems
Published: 2025-03-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Sciences
Herbaceous plant species have been the focus of extensive, long-term research into climate change responses, but there has been little effort to synthesize results and predicted outlooks from different model species. We summarize research on climate change responses for eight intensively-studied herbaceous plant species. We establish generalities across species, examine limitations, interrogate [...]
Inbreeding and high developmental temperatures affect cognition and boldness in guppies (Poecilia reticulata)
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Inbreeding impairs the cognitive abilities of humans, but its impact on cognition in other animals is poorly studied. For example, environmental stress (e.g. food limitation and extreme temperatures) often amplifies inbreeding depression in morphological traits, but whether cognition is similarly affected is unclear. We, therefore, tested if a higher temperature (30°C versus 26°C) during [...]
Paternity analysis reveals sexual selection on cognitive performance in mosquitofish
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In many animal species, cognitive abilities are under strong natural selection because decisions about foraging, habitat choice and predator avoidance affect fecundity and survival. But how has sexual selection, which is usually stronger on males than females, shaped the evolution of cognitive abilities that influence success when competing for mates or fertilizations? We aimed to investigate [...]
Alike but still different: coexistence of four raptor species explained by breeding niche overlap
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Late Pleistocene faunal community patterns disrupted by Holocene human impacts
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Paleobiology
We analysed fossil mammal assemblages from over 350 Late Pleistocene and Holocene sites worldwide to test whether human activities, such as agriculture, domestication and intensified land use, restructured global patterns of mammal co-occurrence. Using presence-absence data, we contrasted a novel iterative ‘chase clustering’ method, which is compositionally driven, against a traditional spatially [...]
No evidence for assortative mating in the Atlantic puffin
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Assortative mating occurs when individuals with similar phenotypes mate together more often than by chance and can contribute to increases in homozygosity, linkage disequilibrium between loci, and premating isolation in a phenotypically divergent population. While this phenomenon has been well documented in many avian species, evidence is relatively scarce in seabirds. Most seabirds are [...]
Increased Arctic fire occurrence related to human activity calls for improved management
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Arctic fires have become more frequent in recent decades. They release carbon to the atmosphere through burning organic material and degrading permafrost and thus accelerate global warming. Previous research highlighted climate variables as the driving factor of fire occurrence in the Arctic, largely ignoring the contribution of human activity. Here, we analyzed the relationship between fire [...]
Social Learning and Culture in Birds: Emerging Patterns and Relevance to Conservation
Published: 2025-03-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
There is now abundant evidence for a role of social learning and culture in shaping behaviour in a range of avian species across multiple contexts, from migration routes in geese and foraging behaviour in crows, to passerine song. Recent emerging evidence has further linked culture to fitness outcomes in some birds, highlighting its potential importance for conservation. Here, we first summarise [...]
Viability selection on coat spot patterns correlates with temperature anomalies in Masai giraffes
Published: 2025-03-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Remarkable variation in animal colour patterns is often shaped by heterogeneous selection, reflecting adaptation to variable environmental conditions. However, the adaptive functions of patterns and drivers of selection remain poorly understood. Shape and size of colour patterns may help with thermoregulation and thus be altered by temperature anomalies, which are predicted to be more frequent [...]
Citizen science data supports sexual dichromatism but rejects thermal melanism in the European fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra)
Published: 2025-03-18
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Background Conspicuous color patterns are traditionally believed to advertise the toxicity of prey to potential predators. However, many aposematic species show drastic variation in coloration, indicating the possibility of other functions of coloration. To study these other functions, we can investigate the influence of inherent (e.g., sex) and external factors (e.g., climate) on color [...]
Predicting interaction frequency in plant-pollinator networks
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Flowers and their pollinators represent a bipartite interaction system, whose links are hypothesised to be related to species traits. To explore whether we can predict the weight of this link, i.e. the frequency of interactions, in an validation network, we analysed 14 studies of pollinator-flower visitation network from around the world. We used information on species abundances, their traits [...]
Model-based ordination for phenological studies: from controlling sampling bias to inferring temporal associations
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Multivariate Analysis, Statistical Methodology
Willig et al. (Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 15, 868--885, 2024) cautioned that unequal sampling effort and pseudoreplication can bias the characterisation of species phenology using circular statistics. Borrowing concepts from rarefaction, they proposed bootstrapping to control for time-varying marginal totals that arise from unequal sampling effort over time. This study extends their [...]
Validating causal inference in time series models with conditional-independence tests
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Population Biology, Sustainability
Ecologists often use time-series models to approximate dynamics arising from density dependence, species interactions, community synchrony, and other processes. Dynamic structural equation models can represent simultaneous and lagged interactions among variables with missing data, and therefore encompasses a wide family of analyses (linear regression, vector autoregressive models, and dynamic [...]
The Interaction Affinity Between Flowers and Their Pollinators
Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
It is a common knowledge that the probability of the fertilisation of a flower by its pollinator is a function of species abundances. However, this relation was rarely formalised for analysing pollination networks. In this opinion paper, a simple model borrowed from physical chemistry is introduced to formalise this functional dependence. This led to a well-known biochemical concept of affinity, [...]
MYB regulator of ‘colorless’ flavonols underlies the evolution of red flowers in Iochroma (Solanaceae)
Published: 2025-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Anthocyanins, the pigments that give rise to blue, purple, red and pink colors in many flowers and fruits, are produced by the deeply conserved flavonoid biosynthesis pathway. The regulation of this pathway is thus fundamental for species differences in color across flowering plants, and a growing body of evidence implicates MYB transcription factors as key players activating or suppressing the [...]