Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Integrative Biology
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 [...]
A systems-modelling approach to predict biological responses to extreme heat
Published: 2025-07-16
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 short-term but 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 [...]
Topological equivalence of stomata distribution patterns across vascular plants
Published: 2025-07-07
Subjects: Biology, Botany, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Stomata are ancient anatomical structures on leaves that regulate the exchange of water vapor, oxygen, and carbon dioxide between plants and the atmosphere. Acting as valve-like gateways between internal tissues and the external environment, stomata may function as locally interacting networks. Theoretical and experimental evidence suggests that local interactions among neighboring stomata [...]
Non-lethal imaging and modeling approaches for estimating dry mass in aquatic larvae
Published: 2025-06-28
Subjects: Developmental Biology, Integrative Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences, Zoology
Body mass is crucial for scaling and comparing physiological rates. For example, dry body mass is important in determining an organism’s metabolic rate since it excludes metabolically inactive water weight. Obtaining repeated measurements of body mass throughout an individual’s lifetime is trivial. In contrast, we are normally able to obtain only a single estimate of dry body mass per individual [...]
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 [...]
A framework for modelling thermal load sensitivity across life
Published: 2025-06-01
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences
Forecasts of vulnerability to climate warming require an integrative understanding of how species are exposed to, are damaged by, and recover from thermal stress in natural environments. The sensitivity of species to temperature depends on the frequency, duration, and magnitude of thermal stress. Thus, there is a generally recognised need to move beyond physiological metrics based solely on [...]
Interrogating metabolic plasticity in marine organisms: A framework for best practices using metabolomic and lipidomic approaches
Published: 2025-05-14
Subjects: Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Molecular Biology
Understanding the mechanisms that underlie resilience in marine invertebrates is critical as climate change and human impacts transform coastal ecosystems. Metabolic plasticity, or an organism’s capacity to modulate energy production, allocation, and use, plays a central role in mediating resilience under environmental stress. While research on marine invertebrate stress responses has grown, [...]
Model-based ordination for phenological studies: from controlling sampling bias to inferring temporal associations
Published: 2025-03-17
Subjects: Biostatistics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Multivariate Analysis, Statistical Methodology
Willig et al. (Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 15, 868--885, 2024) cautioned that unequal sampling effort and pseudoreplication can bias the characterisation of species phenology using circular statistics. Borrowing concepts from rarefaction, they proposed bootstrapping to control for time-varying marginal totals that arise from unequal sampling effort over time. This study extends their [...]
Seeing herbaria in a new light: leaf reflectance spectroscopy unlocks predictive trait and classification modeling in plant biodiversity collections
Published: 2025-02-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
Reflectance spectroscopy is a rapid method for estimating traits and discriminating species. Spectral libraries from herbarium specimens represent an untapped resource for generating broad phenomic datasets across space, time, and taxa. We conducted a proof-of-concept study using trait data and spectra from herbarium specimens up to 179 years old alongside data from recently dried, pressed [...]
Bats in Habitats, Bats as Habitats: An integrative ecological framework for understanding synergistic interactions across levels of community organization
Published: 2025-02-03
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology, Systems Biology
Global biodiversity and ecosystem function are the result of complex networks of interactions and feedbacks between animals and their environments, which in turn are affected by the interactions and feedbacks between animals and the organisms they host. Understanding these complex networks, including the main drivers of and responses to ecological and environmental changes and their global [...]
The Development and Evolution of Arthropod Tagmata
Published: 2024-12-10
Subjects: Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Integrative Biology, Life Sciences
The segmented body plan is a hallmark of the arthropod body plan. Morphological segments are formed during embryogenesis, through a complex procedure involving the activation of a series of gene regulatory networks. The segments of the arthropod body are organized into functional units known as tagmata, and these tagmata are different among the arthropod classes (e.g. head, thorax and abdomen in [...]
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
Frequency-dependence favors social plasticity and facilitates socio-eco-evolutionary feedback in fluctuating environments
Published: 2024-11-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Integrative Biology
1. Increasing attention is being devoted to the study of phenotypic plasticity in social environments. However, much remains unknown about the selection pressures driving the evolution of social plasticity, as well as the pathways by which social plasticity may facilitate or constrain feedback between ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Here we explore these questions using quantitative genetic [...]
The Deadly Trio: Do warming, acidification & deoxygenation destabilize the anemone-algae symbiosis?
Published: 2024-11-04
Subjects: Integrative Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences
Anthropogenic climate change is primarily driven by carbon dioxide release, which causes a domino effect of warming, acidification, and hypoxia in aquatic habitats. Using a fully-crossed experimental design, we investigated how exposure to this “deadly trio” of environmental stressors affects the sea anemone, Exaiptasia diaphana and its endosymbiotic dinoflagellates. To mimic conditions found on [...]