Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Zoology
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 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 [...]
Can physical closeness measure variation and change in pair association strength in captive geckos?
Published: 2025-05-27
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Zoology
Pair bonding is a key social behaviour but remains understudied in reptiles despite a growing body of evidence suggesting that some species exhibit complex sociality. The lack of evidence regarding the expression of pair association in social lizards species hampers our understanding of its effects on captive welfare. As a first step towards a better understanding of pair related social behaviour [...]
Acclimation to fluctuating hypoxia alters activity and escape performance, but not metabolism, in guppies
Published: 2025-05-03
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Organisms living in fluctuating environments must cope with constantly changing conditions. Here we investigated how acclimation to either fluctuating or constant oxygen affects behavioural and physiological responses to hypoxia in guppies (Poecilia reticulata). Guppies were acclimated to either fluctuating hypoxia (100% of air saturation during day to 40% at night) or constant normoxia (100% of [...]
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 [...]
COI metabarcoding with a curated reference database and optimized protocol provides a reliable species-level diversity assessment of tardigrades
Published: 2025-03-18
Subjects: Zoology
DNA metabarcoding is revolutionizing biodiversity research by providing rapid and efficient ways of collecting species occurrence data. However, it has not yet been effectively applied to many taxonomic groups, mainly due to a significant lack of reference sequences and dedicated protocols. One such group is the tardigrades - a charismatic phylum of microinvertebrates known for 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 [...]
Monogenea on exotic Indian freshwater fish. 8. Co-translocation of Cichlidogyrus tilapiae (Monogenea, Dactylogyridae) with pindani Chindongo socolofi (Cichliformes, Cichlidae), the first report of this parasite genus in India
Published: 2025-02-07
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Life Sciences, Parasitology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Chindongo socolofi (Cichliformes, Cichlidae) is a popular freshwater ornamental fish from Lake Malawi in Africa. Although identifying parasites associated with the global ornamental trade is critical for developing biosecurity practices, little is known about the parasite fauna of C. socolofi. Therefore, this study sought to determine what monogenean parasites C. socolofi harbours in India. Adult [...]
Measuring critical thermal maximum in aquatic ectotherms: a practical guide
Published: 2025-02-03
Subjects: Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
Critical thermal limits, commonly quantified as CTmax (maximum) or CTmin (minimum), are core metrics in the thermal biology of aquatic ectotherms. CTmax, in particular, has recently surged in popularity due to its various applications, including understanding and predicting the responses of animals to climate warming. Despite its growing popularity, there is a limited literature aimed at [...]
Dynamic parental roles revealed by fine-scale hunting behaviour with concurrent pair tracking in the wild
Published: 2024-12-23
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Zoology
Parental cooperation in offspring care is essential for offspring survival in species with extended biparental care. Yet, the mechanisms through which each parent’s foraging skills and performance shape both their own and their partner’s contributions to offspring rearing, particularly in natural conditions, remain poorly understood. Using high-resolution GPS and accelerometer data, we [...]
Simple maternal effect animal models provide biased estimates of additive genetic and maternal variation
Published: 2024-12-16
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Zoology
Maternal effects (the consistent effect of a mother on her offspring) can inflate estimates of additive genetic variation (V_A) if not properly accounted for. As they are typically assumed to cause similarities only among maternal siblings, they are often accounted for by modelling maternal identity effects. However, if maternal effects have a genetic basis, they create additional similarities [...]
Different sources of wind turbine data produce sharp differences in collision risk estimates for foraging vultures
Published: 2024-12-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Monitoring, Systems Biology, Zoology
Multiple studies assessed the collision risk of different vulture species with wind turbines. However, they relied on different sources of wind turbine data, and the effect of this data heterogeneity, on the estimated collision risk and the comparability of these assessments, has not been investigated. We used GPS and accelerometer data, collected from 6 adult Griffon Vultures living in Sardinia [...]
Advancing the spatiotemporal dimension of wildlife–pollution interactions
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.
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