Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Zoology
Recolonisation dynamics of grey wolves: delayed recovery in a Central European country
Published: 2025-11-07
Subjects: Biodiversity, Population Biology, Zoology
Grey wolves have been recovering throughout Europe over the last decades, widely portrayed as a conservation success story. We evaluated the trends and demography of two wolf populations that recolonised the Czech Republic between 2011/2012 and 2022/2023, integrating a variety of fieldwork and laboratory methods including snow tracking, camera trapping, telemetry and non-invasive genetics, with [...]
Multilevel Selection Shaping Adaptive Social Networks
Published: 2025-11-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Human Ecology, Zoology
Understanding how human and non-human animal social networks evolve through emergent properties and feedback mechanisms is essential for explaining their adaptability and persistence. Collective social niche construction refers to the process where individuals, through their interactions, actively shape the social environment, resulting in network structures that influence individual behaviours [...]
An increase in animal diversity was facilitated by ecologically-driven brain complexity throughout the Cambrian
Published: 2025-11-04
Subjects: Developmental Biology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Other Genetics and Genomics, Zoology
The Cambrian Explosion is often seen as a singular event requiring an explanation. In fact, it is better represented as a cascade of linked events, each with numerous causes. The iconic middle Cambrian fauna, represented by sites such as the Burgess Shale, is a culmination of several phases of increases in taxonomic diversity and morphological complexity. I focus on an often-overlooked increase [...]
Going with, or going to the dogs: City Serenade of Multispecies Survival
Published: 2025-11-03
Subjects: Animal Studies, Behavior and Ethology, Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Human Ecology, Ornithology, Other Animal Sciences, Population Biology, Urban Studies and Planning, Zoology
1. As tropical cities rapidly urbanise, multispecies coexistence faces unprecedented challenges. Ground-dwelling (dogs), arboreal (macaques), and aerial (black kites) urban commensals navigate complex social-ecological systems shaped by anthropogenic resource provisioning, cultural practices, and architectural constraints. Despite escalating human-animal conflicts—20 million annual dog bites in [...]
Trends of ungulate species in Europe: not all stories are equal
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology, Zoology
Wild ungulates have deep impacts on socio-ecological systems, and analyzing large-scale population trends in a multispecies set can identify their environmental and socio-economic drivers. We collected annual hunting bags (n = 11,046, period 1975-2018) of 7 wild ungulates of high management interest across 25 European countries. We identified different temporal trends in hunting bags and for roe [...]
Passive acoustic monitoring and deep learning reveal spatiotemporal patterns in gibbon calling behaviour associated with habitat and climate variables
Published: 2025-09-17
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Zoology
1. Understanding the basic ecology of endangered species is essential for effective conservation, yet this remains challenging for elusive species inhabiting tropical forests. For the endangered Bornean white-bearded gibbon (Hylobates albibarbis), basic ecological information remains limited. Most research on the species is restricted to peat swamp forests, while little is known from other forest [...]
Introduced urban lizards (Podarcis muralis) exhibit environmentally plastic activity patterns and precise behavioral thermoregulation
Published: 2025-09-15
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Integrative Biology, Zoology
The ability to effectively thermoregulate is important for most ectotherms, as body temperature determines the rate of nearly all physiological processes. However, for most organisms we lack understanding of which environmental factors affect thermoregulatory behaviors, especially outside of a laboratory setting, and how individual behaviors scale over an entire day and at the population level. [...]
No effect of ocean acidification on individual-level variation in behaviour and susceptibility to predation in a Great Barrier Reef damselfish
Published: 2025-09-05
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Biology, Integrative Biology, Marine Biology, Physiology, Zoology
1) Ocean acidification, caused by rising carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, has been reported to negatively impact a wide variety of behaviours in fishes, including activity, exploration, and predator avoidance. 2) These effects have been documented at the population level, but many animal species naturally show large and repeatable individual-level differences in behaviour. How [...]
Contribution to the knowledge of the distribution of bats (Chiroptera) in Algeria
Published: 2025-09-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Algeria is the largest country in Africa and for the most part has not yet been surveyed for bat species. To contribute to the knowledge of the distribution of Algerian bat fauna, between 2010 and 2025 we surveyed 69 sites from across the country, mostly roost sites but also using mist nets. We found 19 species from six families, out of a total of 27 species from seven families currently [...]
The myth of the metabolic baseline: how sleep-wake cycles undermine a foundational assumption in organismal biology
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology
Basal and standard metabolic rates (BMR and SMR) are cornerstones of physiological ecology and are assumed to be relatively fixed intrinsic properties of organisms that represent the minimum energy required to sustain life. However, this assumption is conceptually flawed. Many core maintenance processes underlying SMR are temporally partitioned across sleep and wakefulness and are not [...]
Modelling complex habitat use for threatened bat species decision-making in landscapes with competing priorities
Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Zoology
Species distribution models (SDMs) provide valuable information to aid conservation decisions, particularly in landscapes where economic and biodiversity priorities compete. Generating SDMs for species that rely on discrete habitat types for different activities (e.g. roosting or foraging) can be challenging, and result in outputs that are not appropriately tailored for end use. We collated [...]
Catalogue of Papilionoidea from Noguera de Albarracín (Teruel, Spain), including new distributional data for the Sierra de Albarracín (Insecta: Lepidoptera)
Published: 2025-08-20
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Zoology
We present a catalogue of butterflies from Noguera de Albarracín (Teruel, Spain), based on field surveys conducted in 2024 and 2025 within the framework of the Iberozoa Entomology Course. A total of 52 species were recorded, representing 20.15% of the Iberian butterfly fauna. The material belongs to 5 families, 13 subfamilies, 33 genera and 52 species. Lycaenidae was the richest family with 16 [...]
Weather conditions are systematically associated with long-range nonroutine movements in a large scavenger
Published: 2025-08-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Zoology
Movement data are valuable for the conservation of Old World vultures, as these move across large distances and experience a wide range of threats. As vultures rely on soaring flight, the interplay of solar radiation, as well as wind direction and strength, is crucial for both short- and long-range movements. However, no study explored the extent to which weather conditions can predict long-range [...]
Strain-specific thermal acclimation, but little evidence of transgenerational plasticity, in an asexual crustacean
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Zoology
Transgenerational plasticity has been suggested as a means for species to succeed in rapidly changing environments, such as increased temperature brought on by climate change. However, the evidence for this phenomenon in animals is mixed. The freshwater crustacean Daphnia magna displays transgenerational plasticity in response to environmental cues such as the presence of predators or food, but [...]
Trapper Citizen Science: an open-source camera trap platform for citizen science in wildlife research and management
Published: 2025-08-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Computational Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Engineering, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Zoology
Effective wildlife monitoring is essential for biodiversity conservation and sustainable management, particularly in the face of rapid environmental changes and human-wildlife interactions. Advances in camera trap technology and citizen science, here used to denote non-professional involvement in scientific research, irrespective of citizenship status, have revolutionized ecological data [...]