Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Cichlid fishes are promising underutilised models to investigate helminth-microbiome interactions
Published: 2024-10-27
Subjects: Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Microbiology, Parasitology
The “Old Friends Hypothesis” suggests that insufficient early exposure to symbionts may hinder immune development, contributing to increased immune-related diseases in the Global North. While the microbiome is often the focus, helminths, which may also offer health benefits, receive little attention. The infection and effect of helminths, in turn, are influenced and may be even determined by [...]
The Mammoth Steppe: A Frosty Savanna
Published: 2024-10-21
Subjects: History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
This study investigates the potential of using contemporary African Grasslands as an ecological analog to understand the Pleistocene Eurasian Mammoth Steppe, a complex ecosystem known primarily through estimations, proxies, and extrapolation of the limited direct evidence. By examining the themes of climate, flora, and fauna, the research aims to assess the validity of African Grasslands in [...]
Language barriers in conservation science citation networks
Published: 2024-10-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Using relevant scientific evidence is crucial to effectively conserve species and ecosystems worldwide. Currently, evidence that is available only in non-English languages is severely underutilized. We examined many underutilized non-English languages in the conservation evidence literature and factors that facilitate the use of non-English-language evidence based on citation patterns of articles [...]
Reassessing a Holocene extinction: multiple lines of evidence do not support the historical presence and recent extirpation of a protected anole on the island of Anguilla
Published: 2024-09-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Genomics, Integrative Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Zoology
Accurate assessment of historical species ranges is important for conservation science and management. Inaccurate historical species ranges can lead to incorrect assumptions about local extinctions, population trends, and potential sites for reintroductions. Yet, historical knowledge is often lacking for many species. Here, we examine the case of the bearded anole, Anolis pogus, which is long [...]
The greatest extinction event in 66 million years?
Published: 2024-09-11
Subjects: Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Biological communities are changing rapidly in response to human activities, with the high rate of vertebrate species extinction leading many to propose that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event. Five past mass extinction events have most commonly been emphasised across the Phanerozoic, with the last occurring at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. Life on Earth has, [...]
Life history shapes variation in egg composition in the blue tit Cyanistes caeruleus
Published: 2024-09-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Maternal investment directly shapes early developmental conditions and therefore has long-term fitness consequences for the offspring. In oviparous species prenatal maternal investment is fixed at the time of laying. To ensure the best survival chances for most of their offspring, females must equip their eggs with the resources required to perform well under various circumstances, yet the actual [...]
Adaptive sampling for ecological monitoring using biased data: A stratum-based approach
Published: 2024-09-10
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Indicators of biodiversity change across large extents of geographic, temporal and taxonomic space are frequent products of various types of ecological monitoring and other data collection efforts. Unfortunately, many such indicators are based on data that are highly unlikely to be representative of the intended statistical populations. Where there is full control over sampling processes, [...]
Snakes (Erythrolamprus spp.) with a complex toxic diet show convergent yet highly heterogeneous voltage-gated sodium channel evolution
Published: 2024-07-25
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Chemical defense plays a crucial role in shaping ecosystems through selection for toxin resistance and has evolved convergently across multiple lineages. Research on toxin resistance has been pivotal in understanding trait evolution, as it often evolves through a simple genetic mechanism, target-site resistance (TSR), where mutations in target genes confer resistance. However, in tropical [...]
Deciphering probabilistic species interaction networks
Published: 2024-07-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Representing species interactions probabilistically (how likely are they to occur?) as opposed to deterministically (are they occurring?) conveys uncertainties in our knowledge of interactions and information on their variability. The sources of uncertainty captured by interaction probabilities depend on the method used to evaluate them: uncertainty of predictive models, subjective assessment of [...]
Disentangling variational bias: the roles of development, mutation and selection
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The extraordinary diversity and adaptive fit of organisms to their environment depends fundamentally on the availability of variation. While many evolutionary studies assume that random mutations produce isotropic phenotypic variation, the distribution of variation available to natural selection is more restricted, as the distribution of phenotypic variation is affected by a range of factors in [...]
Repeatability and intra-class correlations from time-to-event data: towards a standardized approach
Published: 2024-07-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Many biological features are expressed as “time-to-event” traits, such as time to first reproduction or response to some stimulus. The analysis of these traits frequently produces right-censored data in cases where no event has occurred within a certain timeframe. The Cox proportional hazards (CPH) model, a type of survival analysis, accounts for censored data by estimating the hazard of an event [...]
Mapping migratory routes: Avian conservation-focused opportunities for a pan-European automated telemetry network
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Accelerated biodiversity loss during the Anthropocene has destabilised functional links within and between ecosystems. Migratory species that cross different ecosystems on their repeated journeys between breeding and non-breeding sites are particularly sensitive to global change because they are exposed to various, often ecosystem-specific threats. As these bring both lethal and non-lethal [...]
Social ageing varies within a population of bottlenose whales
Published: 2024-07-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
How social behaviour changes as individuals age has important consequences for the health and function of both human and non-human societies. However, the extent of inter-individual variation in social ageing has been underappreciated, especially in natural populations of animals. Here, we leverage a photo-identification dataset spanning 35 years to examine social ageing in an Endangered [...]
Detection of energetic equivalence depends on food web architecture and estimators of energy use
Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecologists have long debated the universality of the energetic equivalence rule (EER), which posits that population energy use should be invariant with average body size due to negative size–density scaling. We explored size–density and size–energy use scaling across 183 geographically–distributed soil invertebrate food webs to investigate the universality of these fundamental EER assumptions. [...]
Cool topoclimates promote cold-adapted plant diversity in temperate mountain forests.
Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Climate strongly influences the composition and diversity of forest plant communities. Recent studies have highlighted the role of tree canopies in shaping understory thermal conditions at small spatial scales (i.e. microclimate), especially in lowland forests. In mountain forests, however, the influence of topography in environmental conditions (i.e., topoclimate) is ought to also influence [...]