Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Behavior and Ethology
Beyond the Vertebrate Model: Insights from Insect Stress Responses
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Behavioral Neurobiology, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Genetics, Molecular Genetics, Systems Biology, Zoology
Stress responses are essential for survival, coordinating behavioural, physiological and molecular adjustments that enable organisms to cope with challenges. Most research has focused on vertebrates, leaving invertebrate stress physiology comparatively underexplored, particularly in insects. In this review, we compare insect and vertebrate stress responses to examine what insects reveal about the [...]
Disease-Dependent Social Responses to Local Disease Composition in a Wild Reptile
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Emerging infectious diseases can generate persistent and locally heterogeneous patterns of risk across animal populations, yet how animal social behaviour varies under these conditions remains poorly understood. When pathogens persist in the environment, individuals may need to respond to disease conditions at fine spatial and temporal scales rather than rely on fixed social strategies. Here, we [...]
Social decision-making in a freshwater gastropod
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Animals are hypothesized to plastically adjust their social behaviour expression dependent on their environment and their phenotype to ensure that its benefits outweigh its costs. There is a strong research bias towards socially complex vertebrates and eusocial insects. Thus, here we study mollusks, a taxon whose social behaviour is less well studied. As predation is one of the strongest drivers [...]
Encounter behaviour shapes ecological distributions
Published: 2026-10-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Marine Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Ecology’s foundational models keep only the first moment of the stochastic distributions of encounters. Yet, encounter behaviour (how animals search, aggregate, hide and move) sets the whole distributional shape: zeros, variance, skew and, where particular behaviours build them, heavy tails. That shape decides vital rates, persistence and spatial pattern, because the rates involved are [...]
Does female personality drive mate preference and reproduction in wild house mice?
Published: 2026-10-07
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Comparative Psychology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social Psychology
Personality, consistent individual behavioural variation, shapes how individuals move and engage with their socioecological environment, potentially influencing how they assess and choose mates. This makes personality a potential target of sexual selection. Indeed, personality is linked to partner choice, pair formation and mating outcomes in both human and non-human animals. However, it remains [...]
Wolf–Deer and Guild Camera-trap Detections Across Wisconsin’s Statewide Wolf Range (2018–2025), Resolved by Deer Class: Buck Selection in the Hard-Antler Season, Bears and Fawns, and Class-Specific Reference Values for Displacement
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
A statewide analysis of wolf-enriched Snapshot Wisconsin camera data (Vraniak 2026d) reported four things: wolves following deer, a temporary rise in that following after the February 2021 wolf harvest, displacement of deer by wolves, and avoidance of people across five co-occurring species. All of it treated deer as a single class. This companion resolves the deer into antlered bucks, antlerless [...]
Population density, cooperation, and the evolution of toothed whale societies
Published: 2026-09-29
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences
Odontocete societies come in two primary forms: stable matrilineally-based groups, often with bonds between groups, and labile associations among related and unrelated females in a ‘fission-fusion’ grouping pattern. There is no general theory to explain why these differing strategies evolved. Primate models of social bond evolution, based on cooperation in food competition, lack utility for [...]
Calibrating exchange-level claims about sperm whale codas against surrogates: overlap, ornamentation and rubato under independent pre-registered control
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Marine Biology
Sharma et al. (Nat. Commun. 15:3617, 2024) report that sperm whale codas carry a combinatorial "phonetic alphabet" built from four dimensions, two of which — rubato (smooth modulation of coda duration across an exchange) and ornamentation (an extra click marking sequence edges) — are properties of coda sequences rather than of codas. Sequence-level claims presuppose a model of the exchange [...]
Relational acoustic geometry of over 20,000 common nightingale strophes: a framework for continuous vocal analysis
Published: 2026-09-15
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ornithology
Large collections of complex animal vocalizations are often organized through predefined song categories, which provide powerful descriptive units but do not directly characterize continuous and representation-dependent relationships within the acoustic material. This study presents a field-grounded framework for examining such relationships without assigning vocalizations to categories in [...]
Behavioural strategy and predator control: a coupled evolutionary predator-prey model for kiwi conservation in New Zealand
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Behavior and Ethology, Dynamic Systems, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Population Biology
Conservation management of endangered species can be enhanced by quantitative frameworks that simultaneously model behavioural adaptations alongside population dynamics. This paper presents a Coupled Evolutionary Predator-Prey Model (CEPPM) that integrates replicator dynamics from Evolutionary Game Theory with an extended Lotka-Volterra predator-prey framework, applied to kiwi (Apteryx spp.) [...]
Moose on the loose: personality-driven space use and activity in a large, free-roaming cervid
Published: 2026-09-10
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Zoology
Background Animal personality (i.e., consistent inter individual behavioural and physiological differences that are repeatable over time and across contexts) has important implications for ecological processes, yet remains poorly studied in large herbivores such as cervids. Methods In this study, we investigated personality and the occurrence of a behavioural syndrome in 33 free ranging female [...]
Suction or filter feeder? Morphology supports a combined feeding mechanism in the Little Auk (Alle alle)
Published: 2026-09-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences, Ornithology
Little Auks (Alle alle) are the most abundant seabird in the Arctic, with their largest colonies in north-west Greenland sustained by foraging nearly exclusively on plankton. Given their high metabolic demands, adults must capture an approximate 60,000 copepods per day, raising long-standing questions about how this can be achieved efficiently, and with this, questions about the anatomical basis [...]
Comparing space use behavior and aviary-based exploration measures in a species rapidly expanding its geographic range
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Species range expansions could be facilitated by consistent behavioral differences between individuals on the range edge relative to those in other parts of the range. Movement behaviors in particular are thought to be important for expanding and invasive species. There is evidence for a relationship between consistent individual differences in exploratory behavior and dispersal (the permanent [...]
Social transmission of fear is disrupted by pharmaceutical pollution
Published: 2026-09-04
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Social information transfer enables rapid responses to threats and underpins collective predator avoidance across taxa. Yet whether the growing threat of environmental pollutants, such as pharmaceuticals, disrupt this process remains unknown. Here, we show that the widespread antidepressant pollutant amitriptyline disrupts fear contagion—the automatic matching of an individual’s behavioural state [...]
Sex-specific divergence in microhabitat use and activity patterns in fire salamanders: temperature matters
Published: 2026-09-01
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Zoology
Human-driven climate change and habitat degradation cause alterations in the spatial and temporal availability of natural resources, forcing wildlife to adjust their interactions with the environment in order to survive. To identify changes and promote effective conservation measures within the limited suitable habitats available, it is crucial to better understand habitat use. Activity patterns [...]