Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Animal Sciences
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) [...]
Illegal cattle trade drives New World Screwworm emergence in wildlife and erodes Mesoamerica’s Protected Areas
Published: 2025-07-30
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Diseases, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Parasitic Diseases, Parasitology, Public Health, Veterinary Preventive Medicine, Epidemiology, and Public Health
The New World Screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax; “screwworm”) is a parasitic fly historically endemic to the Americas. Females lay eggs in open wounds of warm-blooded animals, including humans. The emerging larvae feed on the host’s living tissue, often resulting in severe damage and potentially death. After five decades of coordinated efforts, the screwworm was successfully eradicated from [...]
Big bills, small changes: with few exceptions, Jungle crows show minor variation in bill morphology across their distribution
Published: 2025-07-21
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Examinations of morphology can reveal a species' relationship with the environment and their evolutionary trajectory. Particularly pronounced difference can hint at specific selection pressures, and reveal hitherto unknown species. Cryptic species, with only subtle morphological differences, are widespread and ignoring them risks underestimating biodiversity and their threatened status. Recently [...]
A systems-modelling approach to predict biological responses to extreme heat
Published: 2025-07-15
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Systems Biology
Anthropogenic climate change is leading to more frequent and extreme heat waves. These large-scale events are radically re-shaping interactions among organisms – impacting biodiversity, community composition and ecosystem services crucial to natural systems and food security. Predicting heat wave impacts on interacting species requires an understanding of the processes driving differential [...]
Evaluating the role of Zoo Campuses in Wild Snake Body Condition and Ophidiomycosis Risk
Published: 2025-07-08
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences
Abstract.—Snake Fungal Disease (SFD), caused by Ophidiomyces ophidiicola, poses a growing threat to snake populations. This study compared infection prevalence, body condition, and species composition between snakes found at Caldwell Zoo located in Tyler, Texas and those found in surrounding wild areas. While infection rates were similar (14.3% zoo, 12.1% wild), zoo-caught snakes had [...]
Free-ranging dogs in the streets: foreseeing a multispecies coexistence crisis beyond shortsighted kindness or conflicts
Published: 2025-06-20
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Coexistence solutions tout conflict mitigation goals for commensals and wildlife, often ignoring the lived multispecies entanglements. 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 [...]
Elevating the importance of Risk of Bias assessment for ecology and evolution
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)
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 selective pressures across biological levels. There are several known toxin resistance mechanisms–such as behavioral avoidance, metabolic detoxification, and target-site insensitivity but an integrative approach to consider multiple toxins and resistance strategies. Predators of amphibians, for example, must counteract multiple chemicals secreted by [...]
Phenotypic flexibility in the city: A meta-analysis on variation
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
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 [...]
Social network differences across the breeding season in a burrowing seabird with assumed similar sex-roles
Published: 2025-04-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Life Sciences
Changes in behaviours that follow seasonal cycles can affect social interactions, which in turn influence social network structures. Because such behaviours are often sex-related, their effect on social associations can impact males and females differently. While the effects of sex-related behaviours on the social network structure of species with distinct parental roles have been studied, their [...]
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 [...]
Tracheal chambers as a key innovation for high frequency emission in bat echolocation.
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
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 [...]
Cognitive evolution in major vertebrate clades: the Lack of Attentional Control hypothesis and the Cognition-Opportunities-Needs framework
Published: 2025-01-29
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience and Neurobiology
The observed difference in relative brain size between endotherms and ectotherms raises questions about potential resulting disparities in brain function between these two groups. Until recently, no clear cognitive advantage was found in endotherms, with ectotherms occasionally even outperforming them in seemingly complex tasks. However, recent research on working memory—a core executive [...]