Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Biology
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems. Sandy Beaches & Dunes of the West African Transition
Published: 2025-05-22
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Abstract The ‘Sandy Beaches and Dunes of the West African Transition’ form a regional ecosystem subgroup along the West African coast. It had a mapped extent of 584 km² in 2022, with a width ranging from 0.012 km to 4.796 km, and stretching over approximately 1321 km. This ecosystem subgroup extends along the shores of Mauritania, The Gambia and Senegal. This ecosystem frequently experiences [...]
The promise of environmental RNA research beyond mRNA
Published: 2025-05-07
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Environmental RNA (eRNA) studies have primarily focused on species detection and community composition through metabarcoding or metatranscriptomics, and on gene expression through messenger RNA (mRNA) abundance analysis. While valuable, this focus overlooks the broader functional roles of other RNA types in cellular metabolism. Beyond mRNA, non-coding RNAs as well as structural RNAs play critical [...]
Slithering Sentinels: assessing the relevance of sea snakes as bioindicators for monitoring New Caledonia's Lagoon
Published: 2025-04-30
Subjects: Biology, Marine Biology
Coral reefs are vital ecosystems, rich in biodiversity and economically significant. However, they face severe threats from human activities such as climate change, pollution, and overfishing. Large-scale monitoring is crucial for their conservation. Integrative bioindicators are needed to better assess their health. Marine snakes, as high-level predators with strong site fidelity, are excellent [...]
AedesTraits: A global database of temperature–dependent trait responses in Aedes mosquitoes
Published: 2025-04-07
Subjects: Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Invasive Aedes mosquitoes are major vectors of arboviral diseases such as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, posing an increasing threat to global public health. Their recent geographic expansion calls for predictive models to simulate population dynamics and transmission risk. Temperature is a key driver in these models, influencing traits that affect vector competence. While data on [...]
Understanding different types of repeatability and intra-class correlation for an analysis of biological variation
Published: 2025-04-05
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Repeatability (more generally known as intraclass correlation) represents an important quantity of interest in many scientific fields. It represents a metric for summarizing variance decomposition to identify sources of variation in an outcome of interest (e.g. organismal traits). The estimation of variance components is often achieved through linear mixed-effect models or their extension, [...]
Socioecology and the role of scramble competition
Published: 2025-03-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology
Ecological explanations for social organization and behavior are central to behavioral ecology. Unfortunately, the continuing mismatch between theoretical predictions and some empirical data led to increasingly complex hypotheses with numerous factors, raising doubts about their predictive value or even falsifiability. Moreover, several taxon-specific socioecological hypotheses have been [...]
Minimal viable sound systems for language evolution
Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Physiology, Systems Biology
Human vocal gamut covers 3000 unique speech sounds comprising the world’s languages, with each new speaker having to learn the sounds of its new language. Since large, expandable repertoires are facilitated by vocal learning, this capacity has long been considered a prerequisite for speech and language evolution. The postulation of a vocal learning and repertoire size ceiling has, however, never [...]
Grazer-induced bioluminescence and toxicity in marine dinoflagellates
Published: 2025-03-10
Subjects: Biology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Plant Biology
Marine copepods are the most abundant type of multicellular zooplankton in the global oceans. They imprint their surrounding waters with a unique bouquet of polar lipids; copepodamides. Copepodamides are recognized by prey organisms, who respond by inducing defensive traits including bioluminescence, toxin production, colony size plasticity and structural modifications. Copepodamides are [...]
Tracheal chambers as a key innovation for high frequency emission in bat echolocation.
Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology
Key innovations play a crucial role in driving biodiversity and facilitating evolutionary success by enabling organisms to adapt to various ecological niches through the diversification of phenotypic traits. These innovations have been observed in different vertebrate clades, such as mammals evolving hypsodonty to graze on contemporary grasses and bats with the evolution of echolocation, [...]
Climate-linked evolution and genetics in a warming Arctic
Published: 2025-02-27
Subjects: Biology, Life Sciences
The extent to which species might be able to evolutionarily respond to rapid environmental change relies strongly on their genetic diversity. Accurate knowledge of both patterns of evolution and genetic variation across the species range is important for determining appropriate conservation and management strategies. The Arctic is the fastest-warming region on the planet, with the rest of the [...]
HusMorph: A simple machine learning app for automated morphometric landmarking
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biology
Manually obtaining the length and other morphometric features of an animal can be time- consuming, and consistent measurements are challenging with large datasets. By leveraging high-throughput computing power and machine learning-based computer vision, such phenotypic data can be rapidly collected with high accuracy. Here we present HusMorph, a novel application with a simple and intuitive [...]
Prior land use shapes the functional composition of tree-seedling communities along a tropical forest chronosequence
Published: 2025-02-21
Subjects: Biology, Forest Biology, Plant Biology
Tropical rainforests are highly threatened by deforestation, yet they have the potential to regrow naturally when left abandoned. To understand natural recruitment, it is essential to explore the recovery of tree-seedlings and their traits within the community assembly of secondary forests. Here, we studied the taxonomic and functional diversity as well as the composition of tree seedling [...]
Northward expansion of the thermal limit for the tick Ixodes ricinus over the past 40 years
Published: 2025-02-14
Subjects: Bioinformatics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
The tick Ixodes ricinus is the main pathogen vector in Europe. Many speculations have been made about the effect of past climate change on the potential distribution of this ectothermic organism, despite a poor understanding of how climate change has resulted in distribution changes to date. In this study, we used a public cross-sectional dataset of I. ricinus abundance at the northern edge of [...]
The importance of cities in protecting imperiled species
Published: 2025-02-10
Subjects: Biology
Habitat loss and alteration from urbanization threaten global biodiversity, and municipal decision-making therefore affects the persistence of many imperiled species. Using Canada as a case study, we quantified the overlap between critical habitats of imperiled species in large urban areas. Of these species, 14% were urban-restricted, and ~28% of these species, spanning nine taxonomic groups, had [...]
Shaped from an early age: behavioural and hormonal phenotypes in juvenile male guinea pigs living in distinct social environments
Published: 2025-02-05
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Behavioural plasticity enables individuals to vary their behaviour in response to different environmental conditions. As the social environment can change at any time, individuals need to be able to adjust throughout their lives. Our goal was therefore to elucidate when and how behavioural and hormonal adjustments in guinea pigs occur. We focused on juvenility, an important developmental phase [...]