Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Animal Sciences
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 [...]
A practical conservation tool to combine diverse types of evidence for transparent evidence-based decision-making
Published: 2021-10-01
Subjects: Agriculture, Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Life Sciences
Making the reasoning and evidence behind conservation decisions clear and transparent is a key challenge for the conservation community. Similarly, combining evidence from diverse sources (e.g., scientific vs non- scientific information) into decision-making is also difficult. Our group of conservation researchers and practitioners has co-produced an intuitive tool and template [...]
Learning from your mistakes: a novel method to predict the response to directional selection
Published: 2021-09-27
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Genetics, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Predicting how populations respond to selection is a key goal of evolutionary biology. The field of quantitative genetics provides predictions for the response to directional selection through the breeder’s equation. However, differences between the observed responses to selection and those predicted by the breeder’s equation occur. The sources of these errors include omission of traits under [...]
Matrix quality determines the strength of habitat loss filtering on bird communities at the landscape scale
Published: 2021-09-19
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Habitat loss represent a major threat to biodiversity, however, the modulation of their effects by the non-habitat matrix surrounding habitat patches is still undervalued. The landscape matrix might change community assembly in different ways. For example, low-quality matrices can accentuate environmental filtering by reducing resource availability and/or deteriorating abiotic conditions but they [...]
Nest-boxes alter the reproductive ecology of urban cavity-nesters in a species-dependent way
Published: 2021-08-25
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Population Biology
To mitigate the shortage of natural breeding sites in cities, nest-boxes are provided for cavity-nesters. However, these are not the breeding sites these animals originally evolved in and optimised their breeding performance to. It thus remains inconclusive if nest-boxes can provide adequate substitutes, ensuring equivalent fitness returns for breeding animals. Additionally, the majority of [...]
WHY DO INSECTS EVOLVE IMMUNE PRIMING? A SEARCH FOR CROSSROADS
Published: 2021-08-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Education, Entomology, Immunity, Immunology and Infectious Disease, Life Sciences
Until recently, it was assumed that insects lack immune memory since they do not have vertebrate-like specialized memory cells. Therefore, their most well studied evolutionary response against pathogens was increased basal immunity. However, growing evidence suggests that many insects also exhibit a form of immune memory (immune priming), where prior exposure to a low dose of infection confers [...]
The potential for physiological performance curves to shape environmental effects on social behaviour
Published: 2021-08-06
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
As individual animals are exposed to varying environmental conditions, phenotypic plasticity will occur in a vast array of physiological traits. For example, shifts in factors such as temperature and oxygen availability can affect the energy demand, cardiovascular system, and neuromuscular function of animals that in turn impact individual behaviour. Here, we argue that non-linear changes in the [...]
Social capital: an independent dimension of healthy ageing
Published: 2021-05-24
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Physiology, Public Health, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Zoology
Resources that are embedded in social relationships, such as shared knowledge, access to food, services, social support or cooperation, are all examples of social capital. Social capital is recognized as an important age-related mediator of health in humans and of fitness-related traits in animals. A rich social capital in humans can slow senescence and reverse age-related deficits. Animals have [...]
Implementing network approaches to understand the socioecology of human-wildlife interactions
Published: 2021-05-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Anthropology, Behavior and Ethology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Human population expansion into wildlife habitats has increased interest in the behavioral ecology of human-wildlife interactions. To date, however, the socio-ecological factors that determine whether, when or where wild animals take risks by interacting with humans and anthropogenic factors still remains unclear. We adopt a comparative approach to address this gap, using social network analysis [...]