Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Animal Sciences
Long-term trends in seasonality and abundance of three key zooplankters in the upper San Francisco Estuary
Published: 2022-03-01
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Zooplankton provide critical food for threatened and endangered fish species in the San Francisco Estuary (estuary). Reduced food supply has been implicated in the Pelagic Organism Decline of the early 2000s and further changes in zooplankton abundance, seasonality, and distribution may continue to threaten declining fishes. While we have a wealth of monitoring data, we know little about the [...]
Achieving global biodiversity goals by 2050 requires urgent and integrated actions
Published: 2022-02-24
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Sciences, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Plant Sciences
Human impacts on the Earth’s biosphere are driving the global biodiversity crisis. Governments are preparing to agree on a set of actions intended to halt the loss of biodiversity and put it on a path to recovery by 2050. We provide evidence that the proposed actions can bend the curve for biodiversity, but only if these actions are implemented urgently and in an integrated manner.
101 years of biofluorescent animal studies: trends in literature, novel hypotheses, and best practices moving forward
Published: 2022-02-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Bioinformatics, Life Sciences
Biofluorescent animals have become a recent trend in natural history publishing. While the functions and origins of biofluorescence in fauna remains somewhat controversial, trends in biofluorescence throughout published literature may elucidate these concepts. Here we review 101 years of biofluorescent studies encompassing 108 published papers and 977 unique species records. Our results provide [...]
A low-cost solution for documenting, tracking, and verifying cage-level animal husbandry tasks using wireless QR scanners and cloud-based spreadsheets
Published: 2022-02-03
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Animal care is a critical component underlying successful behavioral and cognition experiments. Technological solutions for documentation and verification of care can aid in monitoring that activities are completed according to standard operating procedures and ensure that no individuals are overlooked. Here, I summarize a low-cost, flexible, and easy to use system that I developed to document [...]
Microclimate shifts in nest-boxes and natural cavities before, during and after nesting
Published: 2022-01-17
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Physiology, Population Biology
Animals breeding in anthropogenic shelters such as nest-boxes experience nesting environment in which they did not originally evolve. Over the past decades, they are additionally challenged by climate change – a major environmental force influencing their reproductive ecology. Despite the central importance of nesting microclimate for offspring development and fitness, very little is known about [...]
Adaptations and plastic phenotypic responses of marine animals to the environmental challenges of the high intertidal zone
Published: 2022-01-15
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology
The high intertidal zone is home to an incredible variety of marine animals, as it offers an escape from low intertidal/subtidal predation and competition, among other advantages. However, this area of the shore also comes with many tide-driven and emersion-associated environmental stressors, such as desiccation, high temperatures and freezing stress, hypoxia, salinity fluctuations, nitrogenous [...]
Latitudinal but not elevational variation in blood glucose level is linked to life history across passerine birds
Published: 2022-01-13
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Zoology
Macrophysiological research is vital to our understanding of mechanisms underpinning global life history variation and adaptation under diverse environments. Birds represent an important model taxon in this regard, yet our knowledge is limited to only a few physiological traits, mostly studied in temperate and Neotropical species. Here, we examined latitudinal and elevational variation in an [...]
Temporal patterns in prey size between sexes in a raptor with extreme size dimorphism: testing the intersexual competition hypothesis using web-sourced photographs
Published: 2021-11-27
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Zoology
In most vertebrates, males are larger than females. For raptors, sexual size dimorphism is reversed, with females being larger. Reversed sexual dimorphism (RSD) in raptors is strongly linked to diet, with species feeding on the most agile prey, for example bird-eating raptors, showing the greatest size differences between the sexes. Hypotheses for reversed sexual dimorphism (RSD) include the [...]
Spearing into the future: a global review of marine recreational spearfishing
Published: 2021-11-23
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Life Sciences
Spearfishing is practiced by a small fraction of younger recreational fishers and has received considerably less scientific attention than angling. This knowledge gap may negatively affect the ability for developing sustainable marine recreational fisheries. We address this through a global systematic review of the literature pertaining to marine spearfishing (both recreational and otherwise) and [...]
Notes on a tree: reframing the relevance of primate choruses, duets, and solo songs
Published: 2021-11-23
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Life Sciences, Zoology
The complexity of primates’ singing behavior has long gathered the attention of researchers interested in understanding the selective pressures underpinning the evolution of language. Among these pressures, a link between territoriality, pair-living, and singing displays has been suggested. Historically, singing primates have been found in a few taxa that are not closely related to each other, [...]
Mobbing in animals: a thorough review and proposed future directions
Published: 2021-10-26
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Communication, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Mobbing is an important anti-predator behavior where prey harass and attack a predator to lower the immediate and long-term risk posed by predators, warn others, and communicate about the predator’s threat. While this behavior has been of interest to humans since antiquity, and aspects of it have been well researched for the past 50 years, we still know little about its ecology and the [...]
A force competition of predator on urban ecosystem
Published: 2021-10-25
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Definitely the fact, is an undeniable impact of habitat change and fragmentation in the urban ecosystem take effect to species loss causes population decline into local extinction. The results that emerged from habitat selection in ecology in this case study may suggest possible opportunistic of population turnover are caused by behaviour adaptive in the life-history of predators. And provides [...]
Arboreal locomotion and trophic security at the dawn of Euprimate vision
Published: 2021-10-23
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Zoology
Primate vision is thought to have evolved in connection with life in the trees. However, several inter-related origins theories—those addressing possible co-evolution with size, predation, diet, daylight, locomotion, and groups—also provide reasonable explanations of their distinct cranial-visual morphology. We hypothesized that demand for high-speed landings in arboreal environments facilitated [...]
Causes and consequences of variation in early-life telomere length in a bird metapopulation
Published: 2021-10-16
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Physiology
1. Environmental conditions during early-life development can have lasting effects on individual quality and fitness. Telomere length (TL) may correlate with early-life conditions and may be an important mediator or biomarker of individual quality or pace-of-life, as periods of increased energy demands can increase telomere attrition due to oxidative stress. Thus, knowledge of the mechanisms that [...]
Predation impacts brain allometry and offspring production in female guppies (Poecilia reticulata)
Published: 2021-10-07
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Survivorship under predation exerts strong selection on reproductive traits as well as on brain anatomy of prey. However, how exactly predation and brain evolution are linked has not been resolved as current empirical evidence is inconclusive. This may be due to predation pressure having different effects across life stages and/or due to confounding factors in ecological comparisons of predation [...]