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Preprints

Filtering by Subject: Animal Sciences

Free-ranging dogs in the streets: foreseeing a multispecies coexistence crisis beyond shortsighted kindness or conflicts

Nishant Kumar

Published: 2025-06-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology

Nature-based solutions tout climate goals, often ignoring the lived entanglements of multispecies coexistence. Tropical cities have become battlegrounds of misguided kindness and escalating conflicts with animals. Human niche expansion creates a paradox for free-ranging denizens: abundant food sources from waste, yet unprecedented ecological pressures from infrastructural neglect. Using dogs’ [...]

Elevating the importance of Risk of Bias assessment for ecology and evolution

Antica Culina, Dugald Foster, Matthew Grainger, et al.

Published: 2025-06-16
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Microbiology, Plant Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are key evidence synthesis methods informing research and policy. An assessment of the Risk of Bias (RoB) in included studies is normally considered an essential component of these. However, RoB assessment is rare in ecology and evolutionary biology (EEB), and tools from other fields are seldom adopted. To identify reasons for this limited uptake, we surveyed [...]

Toxin resistance mechanisms span biological scales in the Royal Ground Snake (Colubridae: Erythrolamprus reginae)

Valeria Ramírez-Castañeda, Samantha Nixon, Dario Alarcón-Naforo, et al.

Published: 2025-06-13
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genomics, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Molecular Biology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Systems Biology, Zoology

Exposure to multiple toxic compounds imposes diverse selective pressures, potentially leading to a toxin-resistant phenotype that operates across biological levels. There are several known toxin resistance mechanisms–such as behavioral avoidance, metabolic detoxification, and target-site insensitivity. However, most studies have been conducted with exposure to a single toxin or have focused on [...]

Phenotypic flexibility in the city: A meta-analysis on variation

Jules Petit, Melanie Dammhahn

Published: 2025-06-02
Subjects: Animal Sciences

Among global changes urbanisation is distinctive because it entangles a variety of human-induced rapid environmental changes, such as habitat loss and fragmentation, temperature change, introduction of human food sources, and pollution. Urban environments are assumed to be heterogeneous and variable in space and time. A key feature of animals coping with high environmental variability ought to be [...]

Understanding niche conformance in fire salamander larvae: Insights from reciprocal transplant experiments

Laura Schulte, Pia Oswald, Eva Rousselle, et al.

Published: 2025-04-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Life Sciences, Zoology

Amphibians are in particular vulnerable to (climatic) changes in their habitat as they are highly dependent on precipitation and temperature. The larval stage can be considered the most critical life stage in the ontogeny of most amphibians as predation is very high, and larvae are restricted to their natal aquatic habitat. The same applies for larvae of the fire salamander (Salamandra [...]

Transition from incubation to brood-rearing activities influences dyadic associations differently between the sexes in a central-place foraging seabird.

Antoine Morel, Pierre-Paul Bitton

Published: 2025-04-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Life Sciences

1. Changes in activities following seasonal cycles can affect social interactions, which in turn influence social network structures. Because such activities are often sex-related, their effect on the social environment can affect males and females differently, particularly during periods of high activity such as the breeding season. While the effects of sex-related activities on the social [...]

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 [...]

Tracheal chambers as a key innovation for high frequency emission in bat echolocation.

Nicolas Louis Michel Brualla, Laura AB Wilson, Khizar Hayat, et al.

Published: 2025-03-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology

Key innovations play a crucial role in driving biodiversity and facilitating evolutionary success by enabling organisms to adapt to various ecological niches through the diversification of phenotypic traits. These innovations have been observed in different vertebrate clades, such as mammals evolving hypsodonty to graze on contemporary grasses and bats with the evolution of echolocation, [...]

Transferable approaches to CRISPR-Cas9 induced genome editing in non-model insects: a brief guide

Hassan Mutasim Mohammed Ahmed, Lisha Zheng, Vera Sophie Hunnekuhl

Published: 2025-02-27
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Animal Sciences, Entomology, Genetics, Life Sciences, Molecular Genetics, Other Genetics and Genomics, Zoology

Despite the large variety of insect species with divergent morphological, developmental and physiological features questions on gene function could for a long time only be addressed in few model species. The adoption of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas system for genome editing in eukaryotic cells widened the scope of the field of functional genetics: for the first time the creation of heritable genetic [...]

Attentional Control and Vertebrate Cognitive Evolution

Léonore Bonin, Redouan Bshary

Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology

How might brain functioning differ between endotherm and ectotherm vertebrates? Recent results suggest that ectotherms lack proper working memory, which could reflect a lack of attentional control. Ectotherms may nevertheless excel in cognitive tasks if their ecological needs and learning opportunities compensate for their lower computing power.

Lights tuned to the avian eye result in early detection and escape from an approaching aircraft

Ryan B Lunn, Bradley Blackwell, Patrice Baumhardt, et al.

Published: 2025-01-08
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Behavioral Neurobiology, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Collisions between birds and aircraft are a global problem. We identified different behavioral parameters affecting the probability of escape to an approaching aircraft, which is a function of the probability that the animal initiates an escape response (probability of reaction) and the probability of having enough time to escape (probability of sufficient time). Lights of high chromatic contrast [...]

Advancing the spatiotemporal dimension of wildlife–pollution interactions

Jack A. Brand, Jake Mitchell Martin, Marcus Michelangeli, et al.

Published: 2024-11-14
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Animal Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Toxicology, Zoology

Chemical pollution is a pervasive problem and is now considered the fastest-growing agent of global environmental change. Numerous pollutants are known to disrupt animal behaviour, alter ecological interactions, and shift evolutionary trajectories. Crucially, both chemical pollutants and individual organisms are non-randomly distributed throughout the environment. Despite this, the current [...]

Pollinator ethanology: A comment on Bowland et al.

Krzysztof Miler

Published: 2024-11-13
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Nutrition, Pharmacology, Toxicology and Environmental Health, Toxicology, Zoology

BON in a Box: An Open and Collaborative Platform for Biodiversity Monitoring, Indicator Calculation, and Reporting

Jory Griffith, Jean-Michel Lord, Michael D. Catchen, et al.

Published: 2024-10-28
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Plant Sciences

The Convention on Biological Diversity’s Kunming-Montreal Global BiodiversityFramework (GBF) sets ambitious goals to protect and restore biodiversity. It includes a Monitoring Framework that mandates countries to track progress toward these goals using indicators that summarize biodiversity trends. Calculating indicators is challenging for countries due to technical barriers, lack of available [...]

Temporal stability in songs across the breeding range of the Mourning Warbler may be due to learning fidelity and transmission biases

Jay Pitocchelli, Adam Albina, R. Alexander Bentley, et al.

Published: 2024-09-30
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology

We found a stable pattern of geographic variation in songs across the breeding range of the Mourning Warbler over a 36 yr period. The Western, Eastern, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland regiolects found in 2005-2009 also existed from 1983-1988 and 2017-2019. Each regiolect contained a pool of syllables that were unique and different from the other regiolects. The primary syllable types that defined [...]

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