Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Behavior and Ethology
Predicting demographic impacts from sublethal cumulative effects of offshore renewable developments on breeding seabirds
Published: 2026-02-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology, Population Biology
1. Offshore renewable developments (ORDs) are often located in habitat used by protected seabird species and may cause sublethal effects by altering movement patterns and displacing individuals from key resources. Predicting how these effects translate into population-level impacts is challenging for long-lived species because demographic consequences emerge from complex, state-dependent [...]
Age class and natal origin drive foraging patterns in a reintroduced Cinereous Vulture population
Published: 2026-02-04
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ornithology
Widespread vulture population declines are often counteracted by conservation strategies including reintroduction programs and supplementary feeding schemes. However, the role of supplementary feeding – focusing on specific, predictable, feeding sites - on movement behaviour, has been little explored, especially within populations in which reintroduced and wild born birds of different age-classes [...]
Birds on Fire: Heavy disturbance by fireworks affecting wintering gulls, waterbirds and passerines
Published: 2026-01-28
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ornithology
Fireworks are a global anthropogenic disturbance, yet their impacts on wildlife remain poorly understood. Despite frequent media coverage and growing public concern of mass bird disturbances around New Year, scientifically robust assessments of nocturnal behavioural responses on the ground are lacking. Here, I quantified immediate and mid-term responses of urban birds with a focus on Black-headed [...]
Shared acoustic manifolds for exploratory comparison of passerine vocalizations
Published: 2026-01-23
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
This study presents a fixed-parameter pipeline designed to support reproducible embedding of frame-level representations of multiple passerine vocalizations within shared low-dimensional spaces. Three passerine species are considered: Eurasian Wren, Tree Pipit and Common Chaffinch, with a selection of four individuals for each species group. Vocalization frames from each species group are mapped [...]
Inspiring systematic inclusion of individual animal states to enhance the quality of research
Published: 2026-01-23
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Studies on animals continue to attract criticism over data quality, reproducibility and generality of findings, yet one source of variation remains rarely addressed: differences in individuals’ affective states. In this paper, we suggest that evaluating affect should be considered standard good practice in ecological and behavioural research with wild animals, alongside familiar variables such as [...]
Developmental density shapes adult mate guarding strategies in an invertebrate
Published: 2026-01-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Post-copulatory mate guarding is a widespread reproductive strategy that reduces sperm competition but can generate sexual conflict when male and female optima diverge. While mate guarding is known to respond plastically to immediate social conditions, the extent to which early-life social environments of both sexes shape adult guarding behaviour remains poorly understood. We experimentally [...]
How Large Cooperative Groups Avoid Local Competition
Published: 2026-01-19
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution
Large cooperative groups are a common sight in nature. Their existence is puzzling, however, because local competition should keep groups relatively small. A simple but untested way large groups can avoid local competition is by increasing their resource base. We conducted a systematic review and phylogenetic meta-analysis to look for evidence of this effect in wild populations of cooperatively [...]
Social structure in northern bottlenose whales: Stable relationships without stable groups
Published: 2025-12-23
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Marine Biology
Uncovering the drivers and function(s) of social relationships across a wide range of species is key to understanding the ecology and evolution of social behaviour. Northern bottlenose whales have been identified as a particularly important case study for social evolution. Unlike other large, toothed whale species which live in kin-based social units, northern bottlenose whales appear to form [...]
Coevolution of social network structure and life history in toothed whales
Published: 2025-12-18
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Marine Biology
Toothed whales offer a 34 million year-long natural experiment for the evolution of complex mammalian societies. However, quantitative comparative analyses of social structure in these species are lacking. Here, we draw on existing social network analyses to compare social structure across toothed whales. We consider published measures of two social network traits across all toothed whales: [...]
Behavioural repertoire and the onset of precocious sexual behaviours in juvenile ruffs (Calidris pugnax)
Published: 2025-12-10
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Adult phenotypes are shaped by developmental processes during early life. This also applies to reproduction and dominance-related behaviours before maturation, called precocious sexual behaviours. However, beyond largely anecdotal reports, the onset of such behaviours is rarely studied. Here we document the development of precocious sexual behaviours in the ruff Calidris pugnax, a lekking [...]
Ecological, demographic and social factors shape helping decisions at different spatial scales in a facultative cooperative breeder
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
The fitness consequences of cooperative breeding are increasingly well understood, but the ecological and demographic factors driving helping remain contentious. Comparative and single-species studies have identified factors that promote the evolution of helping, but analyses typically test single hypotheses so the relative importance of different factors, and the spatial scale of their [...]
Barking up the wrong tree? Indian street dog woes are emblematic of ecological governance failures for multispecies coexistence
Published: 2025-11-13
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
On August 11, 2025, India’s Supreme Court mandated relocating 2.5 million dogs to address bites and zoonotic disease/death concerns—but reversed course twice since then—revealing that solutions require sequential waste management, education, and sterilization that prioritize addressing root demographic and behavioral drivers over reactive management.
The ecology of resting behaviour in terrestrial vertebrates, and potential effects of anthropization
Published: 2025-11-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Inactive behaviours are a major component of animals’ lives, generally representing important proportions of time budgets. The conditions in which they occur are thus likely to have key effects on individual fitness. Yet, relatively little research has focused on the determinants and ecological consequences of inactive behaviours, likely in part because of the inherent difficulties associated [...]
Multilevel Selection Shaping Adaptive Social Networks
Published: 2025-11-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Human Ecology, Zoology
Understanding how human and non-human animal social networks evolve through emergent properties and feedback mechanisms is essential for explaining their adaptability and persistence. Collective social niche construction refers to the process where individuals, through their interactions, actively shape the social environment, resulting in network structures that influence individual behaviours [...]
Going with, or going to the dogs: City Serenade of Multispecies Survival
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Human Ecology, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Population Biology, Urban Studies and Planning, Zoology
1. As tropical cities rapidly urbanise, multispecies coexistence faces unprecedented challenges. Ground-dwelling (dogs), arboreal (macaques), and aerial (black kites) urban commensals navigate complex social-ecological systems shaped by anthropogenic resource provisioning, cultural practices, and architectural constraints. Despite escalating human-animal conflicts—20 million annual dog bites in [...]