Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Behavior and Ethology
First Photographic and Video Documentation of the Booted Warbler (Iduna caligata) in Egypt Since Its First Record in 1993
Published: 2025-10-27
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
The Booted Warbler (Iduna caligata) is a small migratory passerine breeding across Central Asia and wintering mainly in the Indian subcontinent. It is regarded as a rare vagrant in the Middle East and North Africa, with very few confirmed records from Egypt. This study presents the first verified photographic and video documentation of I. caligata in Egypt, recorded on 11 October 2025 at [...]
The age of change: social aging in dolphins
Published: 2025-10-27
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Recent work has unearthed strong relationships between aging and average sociability. Clear patterns of decreases in average sociability are observed across taxa, many of these are sex-specific. Individuals, however, generally deviate from population averages, and discounting individual variance in behaviour could disguise mechanisms of adaptation, selection, and developmental stability. Here, we [...]
Invasive mosquitofish become more aggressive in the presence of native pike young-of-year: implications for native predator recruitment
Published: 2025-10-14
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Invasive species often exhibit aggressive behaviour, boldness, and high foraging activity, which contribute to their establishment success and impact on native ecosystems. The mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki), one of the world’s most invasive fish species, is known for its aggressive nature, which threatens the survival of native species. Lake littoral zones, critical for juvenile fish [...]
Narrative-Movement Framework (NMF): A socio-ecological systems (SES) approach to human narratives, animal movement, and coexistence in shared landscapes
Published: 2025-10-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Other Arts and Humanities, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Life Sciences
1. Managing human-wildlife coexistence is essential for biodiversity conservation in places where humans and nonhumans compete for access to ecosystems. Viewing human-wildlife conflict as part of a complex web of positive and negative connections that exist between humans and nature is essential. 2. The field of socio-ecological systems (SES) seeks to understand these connections between [...]
Born this way: individuality is seeded before birth and robust to environmental stress
Published: 2025-09-29
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Behavioral individuality, or consistent individual differences in behavior, are pervasive across the animal world and have major ecological and evolutionary consequences. Nevertheless, we still have a limited understanding of what drives individuality and how it emerges during ontogeny. Here, we subjected clonal individuals to a ubiquitous yet critical environmental challenge—the threat of [...]
Passive Acoustic Monitoring and Deep Learning Reveal a Lag From Rainfall to Gibbon Song Across a Mosaic Forest Landscape
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
1. Understanding the fundamental ecology of endangered species is essential for effective conservation, yet this remains challenging for elusive species inhabiting tropical forests. For the endangered Bornean white-bearded gibbon (Hylobates albibarbis), much of the available ecological information derives from peat swamp forests, while comparatively little is known from other forest types that [...]
Dietary preferences and behaviour of the Southern Lesser Bushbaby Galago moholi (Loriformes: Galagidae) foraging at an entomological light trap
Published: 2025-09-15
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
The Southern Lesser Bushbaby Galago moholi is a small, nocturnal, strepsirrhine primate, native to Sub-Saharan Africa. Previously considered a strict dietary specialist on tree exudates and insects, recent observations have revealed hitherto unappreciated plasticity in its feeding behaviour, encompassing fruits and even small vertebrates. While arthropods are an important seasonal component of [...]
Introduced urban lizards (Podarcis muralis) exhibit environmentally plastic activity patterns and precise behavioral thermoregulation
Published: 2025-09-15
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Integrative Biology, Zoology
The ability to effectively thermoregulate is important for most ectotherms, as body temperature determines the rate of nearly all physiological processes. However, for most organisms we lack understanding of which environmental factors affect thermoregulatory behaviors, especially outside of a laboratory setting, and how individual behaviors scale over an entire day and at the population level. [...]
Persefone.jl: Modelling Biodiversity in Dynamic Agricultural Landscapes
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Agriculture, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Population Biology
Agricultural landscapes are highly dynamic, constantly changing across space and time due to the effects of farm management, plant phenology, and environmental fluctuations. These dynamics play a critical role in shaping biodiversity patterns and contribute to negative population trends in numerous species, but are rarely considered in ecological models of farmland biodiversity. Here, we present [...]
Lateralisation shapes spatial learning in lizards
Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Evolution, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Spatial memory is fundamental cognitive process that allows animals to navigate and interact with their environment effectively. While extensively studied in mammals and birds, the mechanisms underlying spatial cognition in reptiles remain less understood. In this study, we investigated spatial learning and the potential influence of behavioural lateralisation in the common wall lizard (Podarcis [...]
Habitual tool use on monopolizable resources affects group cohesion
Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology
Tool-aided extractive foraging changes animals’ interactions with their environment by expanding access to novel and/or high-quality foods. If and how habitual reliance on tool use impacts animals’ social dynamics is less understood. If materials for tool use are monopolizable, tool use might increase intragroup competition. While higher intragroup competition encourages greater group spread, [...]
Tracking the hidden niches: Movement-based insights into northern lapwing intraspecific variation and conservation
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Zoology
Global monitoring data reveal farmland bird population declines, primarily driven by agricultural intensification, chemical inputs, and climate shifts. The northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus) is a farmland bird that exemplifies this decline across Europe. The aim of this study is to quantify intraspecific variation in habitat selection and evaluate the degree of behavioural variance in resource [...]
Exploring the Integration of Traditional Ecological Knowledge with Artificial Intelligence to Mitigate Human-Wildlife Conflict in Kerala, India
Published: 2025-08-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Increasing human-wildlife conflict (HWC) in forest-fringe landscapes necessitates innovative and culturally acceptable mitigation strategies. This note proposes integrating Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mitigate HWC in Kerala. The proposition aims to translate African rural traditional knowledge of using alarm calls of Guinea fowls (Numida meleagris) [...]
okaapi: an R package for generating social networks based on trait preferences
Published: 2025-07-09
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Modelling of simulated networks with generative network models plays a central role for our understanding of the emergence and consequences of network structures. Accessible software that generates simulated networks based on relevant processes can facilitate the use of this important approach in behavioural ecology, and can help drive forward our understanding of animal social structures. Here [...]
Using accelerometer-based behavioral classification to enhance scavenger conservation
Published: 2025-07-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences
1. Human activities are endangering animal species globally and implementing effective conservation strategies requires understanding animal behavior and ecology. Advancements in GPS tracking technology, accelerometry, and machine learning algorithms are allowing the in-situ study of animal movement and behavior remotely. However, the challenge of building supervised machine learning [...]