Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Biology

Enhancing Canopy Research in Africa: Insights from Tree Climbing Workshop in Ghana

Bismark Ofosu-Bamfo, Steven Pearce, Victoria Tough, et al.

Published: 2024-11-29
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology

The report shares the background and experience executing a tree climbing workshop in Ghana. In most cases, canopy research in Africa is conducted under the umbrella of parachute science, leaving local scientists deprived of canopy access skills and equipment. Consequently, tropical Africa experiences a closed canopy so far as canopy ecology is concerned. In May 2024, ten (10) early career [...]

The evolutionary conflict theory of aging

Gordon Irlam

Published: 2024-11-21
Subjects: Biology, Evolution

Why we age is an enduring mystery. This manuscript proposes aging is microevolutionarily opposed, but macroevolutionarily favored. Such a conflict between microevolution and macroevolution is highly unusual since traits that are harmful to the organism are usually harmful to the survival of the species. In the case of aging, however, a shorter lifespan makes a species better able to adapt to a [...]

Advancing the spatiotemporal dimension of wildlife–pollution interactions

Jack A. Brand, Jake Mitchell Martin, Marcus Michelangeli, et al.

Published: 2024-11-14
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Toxicology, Zoology

Chemical pollution is a pervasive problem and is now considered the fastest-growing agent of global environmental change. Numerous pollutants are known to disrupt animal behaviour, alter ecological interactions, and shift evolutionary trajectories. Crucially, both chemical pollutants and individual organisms are non-randomly distributed throughout the environment. Despite this, the current [...]

Pollinator ethanology: A comment on Bowland et al.

Krzysztof Miler

Published: 2024-11-13
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Nutrition, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Toxicology, Zoology

Earlier and increased growth of tundra willows after a decade of growth in a warmer common garden environment

Madelaine Jean Robertson Anderson, Isla H Myers-Smith, Erica Zaja, et al.

Published: 2024-11-08
Subjects: Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

1. The expansion of woody shrubs, known as shrubification, is one of the most widely observed patterns of vegetation change in the tundra. Yet, we do not know the relative importance of plant plasticity and genetic change in determining shrub responses to warming. Plastic responses to the environment can be rapid, while genetic differentiation is much slower. 2. We established a common garden [...]

Niche dynamics of alien plant species in Mediterranean Europe

Luigi Cao Pinna, Laure Gallien, Tommaso Jucker, et al.

Published: 2024-11-03
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

Aim Humans have spread plants globally for millennia, inadvertently causing ecological disruptions. However, biological invasions also provide a unique opportunity to study the process of niche dynamics, through which species adapt their niche when confronted with novel environments. Focusing on the Mediterranean Basin, we assessed 1) which traits favour niche dynamics, and 2) whether niche [...]

BON in a Box: An Open and Collaborative Platform for Biodiversity Monitoring, Indicator Calculation, and Reporting

Jory Griffith, Jean-Michel Lord, Michael D. Catchen, et al.

Published: 2024-10-29
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Plant Sciences

Biodiversity loss is a critical global challenge. The Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) sets ambitious goals to protect ecosystems, halt species loss, and enhance biodiversity. The GBF’s Monitoring Framework requires countries to track progress toward biodiversity targets using a standardized set of indicators that summarize complex trends in biodiversity. However, the [...]

Should I stay or should I go: Transmission trade-offs in mobile genetic elements

Jana Sanne Huisman, Andrina Bernhard, Claudia Igler

Published: 2024-10-17
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Microbiology

Mobile genetic elements (MGEs), including temperate bacteriophages and conjugative plasmids, are major vectors of virulence and antibiotic resistance in bacterial populations. To maximize reproductive fitness, MGEs have to optimize horizontal and vertical transmission. Yet, the cost of horizontal transmission (e.g. phage lysis) puts these transmission modes at odds. Using virulence-transmission [...]

How can we make conferences more inclusive? Lessons from the International Ethological Congress

Rebecca Shuhua Chen, Tuba Rizvi, Ane Liv Berthelsen, et al.

Published: 2024-09-24
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences

Despite growing awareness of the importance of researcher diversity, barriers to inclusion and equity persist in science and at academic conferences. As hosts of the 37th International Ethological Congress, “Behaviour 2023”, we studied equity, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) issues using observational and experimental behavioural data collected during question and answer (Q&A) sessions in [...]

Wild vs. domestic ungulate ecosystem impacts: understanding functional differences requires greater focus on mechanisms

Julia D. Monk, Kristin J. Barker, Samantha M.L. Maher, et al.

Published: 2024-09-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Ungulates play vital roles in ecological systems, shaping plant biomass and diversity via herbivory and impacting soil properties through trampling and nutrient deposition. As ungulate communities fluctuate across the globe, the extent to which wild ungulates and domestic livestock can play similar ecological roles is an increasingly vital - and fraught - question. Here, we synthesized the [...]

On the Origin of Nightjars (Caprimulgidae): Perspectives from the Fossil Record

Albert Chen, Daniel J. Field

Published: 2024-09-13
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Paleontology

Fossils represent the only direct evidence for the ancestral morphologies, antiquity, and historical geographic distributions of life on Earth. The fossil record of the avian clade Strisores (which includes nightjars, oilbirds, potoos, frogmouths, owlet-nightjars, treeswifts, swifts, and hummingbirds) has been richly documented by avian standards, with well-corroborated stem-group representatives [...]

Reconsidering cytonuclear discordance in the genomic age

Drew Allen Larson, Michael Itgen, Robert Denton, et al.

Published: 2024-09-13
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Historically, phylogenetic datasets had very few loci, but were overrepresented for cytoplasmic sequences (mitochondria and chloroplast) because of their ease of amplification and large numbers of informative sites. Under those circumstances it made sense to contrast individual gene tree topologies obtained from cytoplasmic loci and nuclear loci, with the goal of detecting differences between [...]

Repeatability and intra-class correlations from time-to-event data: towards a standardized approach

Kelsey McCune, Coralie Williams, Ned A Dochtermann, et al.

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 [...]

Variation in the diversity of Sotalia (Cetacea:Delphinidae) dolphin whistle repertoires at a continental scale

Gabriel Melo-Santos, Sam Froman Walmsley, Volker B. Deecke, et al.

Published: 2024-07-08
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences

1. While cetaceans are known to produce large and complex acoustic repertoires, the challenges of exhaustively sampling sounds at sea and counting relevant signals has precluded an understanding of their true repertoire diversity. 2. Here we quantify and compare the whistle repertoires of 16 populations in the genus Sotalia, belonging to two sister species, the Guiana dolphin (Sotalia [...]

From eggs to adulthood: sustained effects of early developmental temperature and corticosterone exposure on physiology and body size in an Australian lizard

Ondi Crino, Kristoffer H Wild, Christopher R. Friesen, et al.

Published: 2024-06-28
Subjects: Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

As global temperatures continue to rise due to climate change, developing animals may be increasingly exposed to elevated temperatures. Developing vertebrates can be affected by elevated temperatures directly, and indirectly through maternal effects such as increased exposure to prenatal glucocorticoid hormones. Although many studies have examined how elevated temperatures and glucocorticoid [...]

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