Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Behavior and Ethology
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 emerged as a key research area, offering sensitive and ecologically meaningful endpoints for detecting contaminant effects. Much of this work has focused on pharmaceutical pollutants, now widely recognised as contaminants of emerging concern. Given the field’s rapid growth and increasing data availability, we synthesised four global databases to evaluate the [...]
Acclimation to fluctuating hypoxia alters activity and escape performance, but not metabolism, in guppies
Published: 2025-05-03
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 heat stress in bumblebees
Published: 2025-04-26
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. Insects, due to their short generation times and their sensitive ecological requirements, offer a powerful model for studying rapid physiological and behavioral responses to high temperatures. Solitary insects primarily respond to temperature extremes by moving in space or time to remain in a constant environment, or by exploiting phenotypic [...]
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: 2025-04-01
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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. [...]