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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Behavior and Ethology

Acclimation to fluctuating hypoxia alters activity and escape performance, but not metabolism, in guppies

Elise Doddema, Malin Fløysand, Andrea Campos-Candela, et al.

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

Nastacia Leigh Goodwin, Z Yan Wang

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

Daniel J Stadtmauer

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

Svenja Stoehr, Alexandra Childs, Oliver Krüger, et al.

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 [...]

Inbreeding and high developmental temperatures affect cognition and boldness in guppies (Poecilia reticulata)

Ivan M Vinogradov, Chenke Zang, Md Mahmud-Al-Hasan, et al.

Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Inbreeding impairs the cognitive abilities of humans, but its impact on cognition in other animals is poorly studied. For example, environmental stress (e.g. food limitation and extreme temperatures) often amplifies inbreeding depression in morphological traits, but whether cognition is similarly affected is unclear. We, therefore, tested if a higher temperature (30°C versus 26°C) during [...]

Paternity analysis reveals sexual selection on cognitive performance in mosquitofish

Ivan M Vinogradov, Rebecca J Fox, Claudia Fichtel, et al.

Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

In many animal species, cognitive abilities are under strong natural selection because decisions about foraging, habitat choice and predator avoidance affect fecundity and survival. But how has sexual selection, which is usually stronger on males than females, shaped the evolution of cognitive abilities that influence success when competing for mates or fertilizations? We aimed to investigate [...]

No evidence for assortative mating in the Atlantic puffin

Katja Helgeson Kochvar, Amy C Wilson, Rebecca K Foote, et al.

Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

Assortative mating occurs when individuals with similar phenotypes mate together more often than by chance and can contribute to increases in homozygosity, linkage disequilibrium between loci, and premating isolation in a phenotypically divergent population. While this phenomenon has been well documented in many avian species, evidence is relatively scarce in seabirds. Most seabirds are [...]

Socioecology and the role of scramble competition

Andreas Berghänel, Sarah Marshall, Friederike Range

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 [...]

Individual variation in perceived density and its impacts on the realization of ecological niches

Ane Liv Berthelsen, Barbara A. Caspers, Nayden Chakarov, et al.

Published: 2025-03-06
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Organisms gain information about their local environment using different senses. Variation in both reception and assessment of stimuli leads to differences among individuals in their perception of environments. Here, we highlight the importance of acknowledging and investigating such individual differences by focusing on perceived density, the individual’s assessment of local density. We [...]

The effect of sex, age, and boldness on inhibitory control

Ivan M Vinogradov, Michael Jennions, Eleanor van Veen, et al.

Published: 2025-03-03
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Inhibitory control requires an individual to suppress impulsive actions in favour of more appropriate behaviours to gain a delayed reward. It plays an important role in activities such as foraging and initiating mating, but high within-species variation suggests that some individuals have greater inhibitory control than others. A standard index of inhibitory control used in many taxa is measuring [...]

There is no such thing as an herbivore: incidental and intentional ingestion profoundly affects both herbivores and plant-dwelling invertebrates.

Eric Lopresti, Eric F. LoPresti

Published: 2025-02-26
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Real-life ‘herbivores’ are not the herbivores of our simplistic ecological and behavioral models – real-life herbivores constantly consume other organisms both incidentally and intentionally, with the ‘prey’ usually consisting of plant-dwelling arthropods, smaller invertebrates, and carrion. A remarkable amount of disparate literature has amassed on these phenomena, yet the implications of these [...]

A new perspective on Squamate social cognition – the use of semiochemicals

Birgit Szabo

Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

The Social Intelligence Hypothesis suggests that cognition might be key to enable animals to live in social groups. Especially social cognition is important as it allows animals to respond appropriately to conspecifics and ensure group cohesion. Social cognition is extensively studied in mammals and birds but to gain a broad understanding of the benefits of social cognitive processes in social [...]

Reproductive consequences of mate retention and divorce in a short-lived migratory passerine

Daniel Ramírez, Iraida Redondo, Jesus Martinez-Padilla, et al.

Published: 2025-01-16
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

In socially monogamous birds, pair bond duration varies widely across species, from single-breeding associations to long-lasting, multi-year bonds. Studies on mate retention and divorce have predominantly focused on long-lived species, while research in short-lived and migratory species is limited. Consequently, the fitness consequences of divorce or remating in these species remain unclear. [...]

Does post-natal parental care influence cognitive development in a social gecko?

Birgit Szabo, Eva Ringler

Published: 2025-01-06
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

How cognition evolved remains a debated “hot-topic” in the field of animal cognition. Current hypotheses link variation in sociality, ecology, and more generally, environmental challenges to differences in cognitive development, both between as well as within species. Research supporting the Social Intelligence Hypothesis, which states that cognition evolved to deal with social challenges, is [...]

Dynamic parental roles revealed by fine-scale hunting behaviour with concurrent pair tracking in the wild

Paolo Becciu, Kim Schalcher, Estelle Milliet, et al.

Published: 2024-12-23
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Zoology

Parental cooperation in offspring care is essential for offspring survival in species with extended biparental care. Yet, the mechanisms through which each parent’s foraging skills and performance shape both their own and their partner’s contributions to offspring rearing, particularly in natural conditions, remain poorly understood. Using high-resolution GPS and accelerometer data, we [...]

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