Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Behavior and Ethology
Emerging tools to advance neuroethology in butterflies and moths
Published: 2025-06-30
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Entomology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Butterflies and moths have played historically important roles in developing our understanding of both ecology and evolutionary biology, and neuroethology. In both contexts, the diversity of behavioral strategies and specializations displayed by different Lepidoptera make them informative case studies. However, as in neuroscience more broadly, lepidopteran neuroethology has tended to focus on [...]
Free-ranging dogs in the streets: foreseeing a multispecies coexistence crisis beyond shortsighted kindness or conflicts
Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Nature-based solutions tout climate goals, often ignoring the lived entanglements of multispecies coexistence. Tropical cities have become battlegrounds of misguided kindness and escalating conflicts with animals. Human niche expansion creates a paradox for free-ranging denizens: abundant food sources from waste, yet unprecedented ecological pressures from infrastructural neglect. Using dogs’ [...]
Nutritional needs and social bonds: how early-life dependencies shape meerkat sociality
Published: 2025-06-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Across species, social systems vary in their extent of interactions, competition, cooperation, and cohesion. Though there has been considerable research on overall social structures, the dynamics of how an individual's social niche develops during early life and how biological needs of offspring shape sociality has received less attention. In this study, we took a longitudinal approach targeting [...]
From vocal homophily to vocal repertoire flexibility: Unravelling the socioecological drivers of language evolution
Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Animal Studies, Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Evolution
Since diverging from the last common ancestor with bonobos and chimpanzees, the communication system of the hominin lineage underwent a radical transformation. Vocal production learning - the ability to produce novel vocalizations based on experience - is the necessary pre-condition for changing an ape-like communication system into one that is infinitely flexible, extensively learned, and [...]
Toxin resistance mechanisms span biological scales in the Royal Ground Snake (Colubridae: Erythrolamprus reginae)
Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Molecular Biology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Systems Biology, Zoology
Exposure to multiple toxic compounds imposes diverse selective pressures, potentially leading to a toxin-resistant phenotype that operates across biological levels. There are several known toxin resistance mechanisms–such as behavioral avoidance, metabolic detoxification, and target-site insensitivity. However, most studies have been conducted with exposure to a single toxin or have focused on [...]
Quality, quantity, and the adaptive function of social relationships
Published: 2025-05-31
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology
Affiliative social relationships have clear links to fitness in a variety of species, yet exactly why that is the case remains elusive. One major development has been the recognition that animals form different kinds of social relationships. These likely represent distinct evolutionary strategies, beneficial in different environments. To set the stage for investigating this idea systematically, [...]
The role of touch in marine mammal sociality: a review and future directions
Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences
While social living has many advantages, it also has significant challenges associated with differences in individual interests, abilities, and intentions. Individuals in social species rely on diverse behaviours and signals across senses to mediate their relationships. In some species—particularly primates—touch plays a key role in establishing, affirming, and repairing social bonds. However, [...]
Cellular Innovations and Diversity in the Lepidopteran Compound Eye
Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics
Lepidoptera, having co-diversified with flowering plants and adapted to various diel niches, present a remarkable system for studying compound eye cell type diversity. Here we synthesize the latest research regarding lepidopteran eye evolution across different timescales, from species-level variation to family-level changes, and mechanistic levels, from broad anatomical variation to molecular [...]
Can physical closeness measure variation and change in pair association strength in captive geckos?
Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Zoology
Pair bonding is a key social behaviour but remains understudied in reptiles despite a growing body of evidence suggesting that some species exhibit complex sociality. The lack of evidence regarding the expression of pair association in social lizards species hampers our understanding of its effects on captive welfare. As a first step towards a better understanding of pair related social behaviour [...]
State-space models and inference approaches for aquatic animal tracking with passive acoustic telemetry and biologging sensors
Published: 2025-05-15
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Passive acoustic telemetry systems are widely deployed to track animals in aquatic environments. However, investments in integrative methods of data analysis have remained comparatively limited, with current workflows typically considering individual movements separately from space use, home ranges and residency. 2. This review presents a unifying perspective that bridges this divide. We [...]
Aligning Behavioural Ecotoxicology with Real-World Water Concentrations: Current Minimum Tested Levels for Pharmaceuticals Far Exceed Environmental Reality
Published: 2025-05-13
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Toxicology
Behavioural ecotoxicology has rapidly emerged as a key area of research, offering sensitive and ecologically meaningful endpoints for detecting sub-lethal effects of contaminants. Much of this work has focused on pharmaceutical pollutants, now widely recognised as contaminants of emerging concern in aquatic systems. Given the field’s rapid growth and the availability of large-scale open-access [...]
Acclimation to fluctuating hypoxia alters activity and escape performance, but not metabolism, in guppies
Published: 2025-05-02
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Organisms living in fluctuating environments must cope with constantly changing conditions. Here we investigated how acclimation to either fluctuating or constant oxygen affects behavioural and physiological responses to hypoxia in guppies (Poecilia reticulata). Guppies were acclimated to either fluctuating hypoxia (100% of air saturation during day to 40% at night) or constant normoxia (100% of [...]
Facing the heat: behavioral and molecular underpinnings of climate hardiness in bumblebees
Published: 2025-04-25
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Behavioral Neurobiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Climate change heralds an era of increased heat waves, with an estimated 20-30 additional high heat days per year. While climate change is upon us, we still have little understanding of the organismal impacts of high heat and how to combat them. Insects, due to their short generation times and their sensitive ecological requirements, offer a powerful model for studying rapid physiological and [...]
Mechanistic and Phylogenetic Perspectives on Pregnancy Sickness
Published: 2025-04-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Endocrinology, Evolution, Maternal and Child Health
Evolutionary biologists have long been fascinated by the peculiar trait of pregnancy sickness, the syndrome experienced by two-thirds of pregnant individuals which includes nausea and vomiting of pregnancy and, in 2% of cases, progresses to a pathological extreme known as hyperemesis gravidarum. With the recent discovery of the placental hormone GDF15 as the main causal factor in pregnancy [...]
Vibrissae length as a morphological proxy for foraging behaviour in pinnipeds
Published: 2025-03-31
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Marine Biology
Foraging behavior is a key driver of ecological and evolutionary processes, with individual specialization shaping how populations respond to environmental change. Polymorphisms in foraging strategies can both enhance and limit behavioral flexibility at the population level, making it crucial to study individual variation. However, studying foraging is notoriously difficult, and while biologging [...]