Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Population Biology
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 defenses shape ecosystems by orchestrating interactions between species and promoting specialization on toxic prey. Many toxins exist in highly biodiverse tropical ecosystems, sometimes in the same prey, imposing challenges for studying toxin resistance and requiring the development of new models. Royal ground snakes (Erythrolamprus) play a significant but understudied role as predators [...]
Scanning the skies for migrants: 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 [...]
Marine resources alter tundra food web dynamics by subsidizing a terrestrial predator on the sea ice
Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Predator use of resource subsidies can strengthen top-down effects on prey when predators respond numerically to subsidies. Although allochthonous subsidies are generally transported along natural gradients, consumers can cross ecosystem boundaries to acquire subsidies, thereby linking disparate ecosystems. In coastal Arctic ecosystems, terrestrial predators can easily cross into the marine [...]
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. [...]
Gaining insights into the life-history strategies of tropical tree species from a large urban inventory dataset
Published: 2024-06-11
Subjects: Forest Biology, Forest Management, Horticulture, Integrative Biology, Plant Biology, Population Biology
Trees are important ecosystem service providers that improve the physical environment and human experience in cities throughout the world. Since the ecosystem services and maintenance requirements of urban trees change as they grow in time, predictive models of tree growth rates are useful to forecast societal benefits and maintenance costs over a tree’s lifetime. However, many models to date are [...]
Behavioral flexibility is similar in two closely related species where only one is rapidly expanding its geographic range
Published: 2024-06-06
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Comparative Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Human modified environments are rapidly increasing, which puts other species in the precarious position of either adapting to a new area or, if they are not able to adapt, shifting their range to a more suitable environment. It is generally thought that behavioral flexibility, the ability to change behavior when circumstances change, plays an important role in the ability of a species to rapidly [...]
A Gene-Culture Co-Evolutionary Perspective on the Puzzle of Human Twinship
Published: 2024-05-20
Subjects: Biological and Physical Anthropology, Evolution, Maternal and Child Health, Population Biology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Natural selection should favor litter sizes that optimize trade-offs between brood-size and offspring viability. Across the primate order, modal litter size is one, suggesting a deep history of selection favoring minimal litters. Humans, however---despite having the longest juvenile period and slowest life-history of all primates---still produce twin-births at appreciable rates, even though such [...]
MECHANISTIC MODEL OF VEGETATION STRUCTURE AND ANIMAL COMMUNITY INTERACTIONS-INTEGRATING GEDI & TLS DATA IN THE MADINGLEY MODEL
Published: 2024-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Background Vegetation structure is increasingly recognized as a key variable to explain ecosystems states and dynamics. New Remote Sensing tools are available to complement labor intensive field investigations and consider the global biogeography of this parameter. Objectives We propose to model the processes explaining the interaction between vegetation structure and animal community assembly [...]
MacArthur’s consumer-resource model: a Rosetta Stone for competitive interactions
Published: 2024-04-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Recent developments in competition theory, namely, Modern Coexistence Theory (MCT), have aided empiricists in formulating tests of species persistence, coexistence, and evolution from simple to complex community settings. However, the parameters used to predict competitive outcomes, such as interaction coefficients, invasion growth rates, or stabilizing differences, remain biologically opaque, [...]
The natural history of luck: A synthesis study of structured population models
Published: 2024-04-12
Subjects: Life Sciences, Population Biology
Chance pervades life. In turn, life histories are described by probabilities (e.g., survival, breeding) and averages across individuals (e.g., mean growth rate, age at maturity). In this study, we explored patterns of luck in lifetime outcomes by analyzing structured population models for a wide array of plant and animal species. We calculated four response variables: variance and skewness in [...]
Why there are so many definitions of fitness in models
Published: 2024-04-11
Subjects: Biology, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Population Biology
“Fitness” quantifies the ability to survive and reproduce, but is operationalized in many different ways. Generally, short-term fitness (e.g., expected number of surviving offspring) is assigned to genotypes or phenotypes, and used to non-trivially derive longer-term operationalizations of fitness (e.g. fixation probability or sojourn time), providing insight as to which organismal [...]
Searching for and Monitoring the Nests of Imperiled Grassland Birds: Recommendations from the Grand River Grasslands of Iowa
Published: 2024-04-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Grassland birds are the most imperiled avian group in North America, with greater than 50% abundance declines since 1970. Studies examining factors that impact habitat preferences, habitat selection, and reproductive success are critical to developing effective conservation and management plans for these species. These studies often involve searching for and monitoring nests in grasslands, which [...]
Interplay of abiotic, biotic, and individual factors in shaping individual growth and demography in a high-elevation common toad population
Published: 2024-04-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
1. Vital rates of individuals in natural populations, such as survival and breeding probabilities, can be affected by abiotic (i.e. environmental conditions), biotic (e.g. population density), and individual factors (i.e. individual traits). Many studies often consider the direct effects of one or two of these sources of vital-rate variations, but taking them all into account might reveal [...]
Lumpfish, Cyclopterus lumpus, distribution in the Gulf of Maine, USA: observations from fisheries independent and dependent catch data
Published: 2024-03-29
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Population Biology
The Gulf of Maine (GoM) is one of the fastest-warming parts of the world’s oceans. Some species’ distributional shifts have already been documented, especially for commercially-important species. Less is known about species that are not currently exploited but may become so in the future. As a case study into these issues, we focus on lumpfish (Cyclopterus lumpus) because of the recognized and [...]
Not All Mass Mortality Events are Equal
Published: 2024-03-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Population Biology
Mass Mortality Events (MMEs) are defined as novel events involving many individuals dying in a relatively short period of time. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in MMEs due to their perceived increase in frequency. Current definitions are subjective and categorize mortalities varying in magnitude and frequency together. Within this manuscript, Multiple Mortality Events is a [...]