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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Biology

Dietary preferences and behaviour of the Southern Lesser Bushbaby Galago moholi (Loriformes: Galagidae) foraging at an entomological light trap

Jamie C Weir

Published: 2025-09-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences

The Southern Lesser Bushbaby Galago moholi is a small, nocturnal, strepsirrhine primate, native to Sub-Saharan Africa. Previously considered a strict dietary specialist on tree exudates and insects, recent observations have revealed hitherto unappreciated plasticity in its feeding behaviour, encompassing fruits and even small vertebrates. While arthropods are an important seasonal component of [...]

Beyond the green: Socioeconomic and climatic pressures on native vegetation in the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor

Marco Aurélio Mendes Elias, José Alexandre Felizola Diniz-Filho, Natália Mundim Tôrres, et al.

Published: 2025-09-14
Subjects: Biology

This study examines how climatic and socioeconomic variables influence native vegetation cover across 108 municipalities within the Araguaia Biodiversity Corridor (ABC), an ecologically strategic region in central Brazil that connects Amazonian and Cerrado biomes and supports habitat continuity for wide-ranging species such as jaguars (Panthera onca). The corridor was defined as a 40 km-wide [...]

No effect of ocean acidification on individual-level variation in behaviour and susceptibility to predation in a Great Barrier Reef damselfish

Dominique G. Roche, Josefin Sundin, Ben Speers-Roesch, et al.

Published: 2025-09-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biology, Integrative Biology, Marine Biology, Physiology, Zoology

1) Ocean acidification, caused by rising carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, has been reported to negatively impact a wide variety of behaviours in fishes, including activity, exploration, and predator avoidance. 2) These effects have been documented at the population level, but many animal species naturally show large and repeatable individual-level differences in behaviour. How [...]

Contribution to the knowledge of the distribution of bats (Chiroptera) in Algeria

Louiza Derouiche, Chaouki Djeghim, Hocine Reghioui, et al.

Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology

Algeria is the largest country in Africa and for the most part has not yet been surveyed for bat species. To contribute to the knowledge of the distribution of Algerian bat fauna, between 2010 and 2025 we surveyed 69 sites from across the country, mostly roost sites but also using mist nets. We found 19 species from six families, out of a total of 27 species from seven families currently [...]

Revealing the unknown world of the endangered Lear's macaw using GPS-tracking data: identification of critical habitats for conservation

Fernanda Riera Paschotto, Erica Pacífico, Thiago Filadelfo, et al.

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Understanding space use and home range is essential for the conservation planning of threatened species as it helps to assess the suitability, extent, and placement of conservation areas that are imperative for species survival and protection. The Endangered Lear’s macaw (Anodorhynchus leari), a highly mobile frugivore, feeding specialist and endemic to Brazil’s Caatinga dry forest, faces ongoing [...]

Lateralisation shapes spatial learning in lizards

Daniele Pellitteri-Rosa, Birgit Szabo, Andrea Gazzola

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Evolution, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Spatial memory is fundamental cognitive process that allows animals to navigate and interact with their environment effectively. While extensively studied in mammals and birds, the mechanisms underlying spatial cognition in reptiles remain less understood. In this study, we investigated spatial learning and the potential influence of behavioural lateralisation in the common wall lizard (Podarcis [...]

The myth of the metabolic baseline: how sleep-wake cycles undermine a foundational assumption in organismal biology

Helena Norman, Daphne Cortese, Amelia Munson, et al.

Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology

Basal and standard metabolic rates (BMR and SMR) are cornerstones of physiological ecology and are assumed to be relatively fixed intrinsic properties of organisms that represent the minimum energy required to sustain life. However, this assumption is conceptually flawed. Many core maintenance processes underlying SMR are temporally partitioned across sleep and wakefulness and are not [...]

Frequent shifts in pollination strategy are decoupled from diversification in the terrestrial orchids

Jamie B Thompson, Eric Robert Hagen, Elizabeth Anne Forward, et al.

Published: 2025-08-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

Pollinator attraction strategies are central to orchid reproductive biology and have long been hypothesised to accelerate speciation rates, particularly through specialised coevolutionary interactions. However, most macroevolutionary evidence comes from studies of individual genera or tribes, leaving broad-scale patterns unresolved. Here, we reconstruct the evolution of pollination strategy in [...]

Embryos are largely understudied in conservation physiology

Patrice Pottier, Nicholas C Wu, Madison L Earhart, et al.

Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology

Understanding how animals respond to environmental stressors across their life cycle is essential for predicting species’ vulnerability to climate change. Here, we systematically reviewed the literature to quantify the variation in research effort on different life stages in the field of conservation physiology. Specifically, we reviewed experimental studies measuring physiological and [...]

Catalogue of Papilionoidea from Noguera de Albarracín (Teruel, Spain), including new distributional data for the Sierra de Albarracín (Insecta: Lepidoptera)

Mario Alamo, Javier Sánchez González

Published: 2025-08-20
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Zoology

We present a catalogue of butterflies from Noguera de Albarracín (Teruel, Spain), based on field surveys conducted in 2024 and 2025 within the framework of the Iberozoa Entomology Course. A total of 52 species were recorded, representing 20.15% of the Iberian butterfly fauna. The material belongs to 5 families, 13 subfamilies, 33 genera and 52 species. Lycaenidae was the richest family with 16 [...]

Trapper Citizen Science: an open-source camera trap platform for citizen science in wildlife research and management

Magali Frauendorf, Jakub W. Bubnicki, Filip Ånöstam, et al.

Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Computational Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology

Effective wildlife monitoring is essential for biodiversity conservation and sustainable management, particularly in the face of rapid environmental changes and human-wildlife interactions. Advances in camera trap technology and citizen science, here used to denote non-professional involvement in scientific research, irrespective of citizenship status, have revolutionized ecological data [...]

Exploring the Integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Artificial Intelligence to Mitigate Human-Wildlife Conflict in Kerala, India

Jaishanker R, Sooraj N P, Athira K, et al.

Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology

Increasing human-wildlife conflict (HWC) in forest-fringe landscapes necessitates innovative and culturally acceptable mitigation strategies. This note proposes integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mitigate HWC in Kerala. The proposition aims to translate African rural traditional knowledge of using alarm calls of Guinea fowls (Numida meleagris) [...]

Threatened Alpine and Subalpine Ecosystems of Australia: An IUCN Red List of Ecosystems Assessment Version 0.5

Jessica A. Rowland, Chloe Sato, Tracey J Regan, et al.

Published: 2025-07-28
Subjects: Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Genetic evidence for the rediscovery in the wild of the critically endangered Sahara killifish Apricaphanius saourensis (Cyprinodontiformes: Aphaniidae)

Louiza Derouiche, Redouane Tahri, Carlos Rodríguez Fernandes

Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Life Sciences, Zoology

Apricaphanius saourensis was described in 2006 from the Saoura River in western Algeria, and is currently listed as possibly extinct in the wild. We recently discovered an aphaniid population in a very isolated secondary wadi of the Guir River about 115 Km northwest of A. saourensis’ type locality, which we hypothesized could belong to A. saourensis based on images taken from living individuals. [...]

DrawerDissect: Whole-drawer insect imaging, segmentation, and transcription using AI

Elizabeth G Postema, Leah Briscoe, Chloe Harder, et al.

Published: 2025-07-14
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences

1. Natural history museums often curate large collections of pinned insects. These collections represent invaluable records of biodiversity information, ecological patterns and phenotypic variation. A common goal of museums is to create digital versions of these records for curation and research purposes. However, traditional methods of specimen imaging and metadata transcription are [...]

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