Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Entomology
Evaluating vibroacoustic sensor performance and vibration attenuation: implications for soil biodiversity sampling
Published: 2026-09-11
Subjects: Entomology, Life Sciences, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Earth’s biodiversity is undergoing substantial changes in response to anthropogenic stressors, creating a need for efficient methods of assessing biodiversity, particularly in soil ecosystems where sampling remains challenging. Soil vibroacoustics - the use of substrate-borne vibrations or sounds to quantify or detect below-ground biological activity – offers a potentially rapid and scalable [...]
Hive product metagenomics: a promising window into honey bee genomics and bee-associated ecosystems
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Apiculture, Entomology, Genomics, Microbiology, Other Genetics and Genomics
Through their pollination services, bees are essential components of ecosystem functioning, supporting biodiversity and contributing to global food production. Among them, honey bees are particularly important, both for their ecological role and their widespread contribution to many agricultural systems and beekeeping. Honey, beeswax and propolis, among other beehive products, have played a [...]
A harmonised dataset of adult Culex pipiens mosquitoes from 17 administrative Italian regions, 2008–2022
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Biology, Entomology
Culex pipiens s.l. is the primary vector of West Nile Virus in Italy. Despite the availability of abundant long-term surveillance data on adult Cx. pipiens observations in Italy, historical records are often fragmented across regional repositories with heterogeneous formats and metadata. This work introduces a comprehensive, harmonised dataset of adult Cx. pipiens observations collected across 17 [...]
TRIPLE-IJ and SHIFT as a coupled framework for characterising entomopathogenic nematode performance under abiotic stress
Published: 2026-08-26
Subjects: Agriculture, Entomology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Entomopathogenic nematodes (EPNs) of the families Steinernematidae and Heterorhabditidae are widely recognised as promising biological control agents, yet the translation of laboratory-demonstrated virulence into consistent field-scale efficacy remains an unresolved challenge. A central reason for this gap is the fragmented way EPN performance is conventionally characterised: infectivity and [...]
Increase, decrease, or both: A systematic review of mosquito population response to floods
Published: 2026-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Parasitic Diseases, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology, Virus Diseases
Floods are increasing in frequency and severity under the ongoing climate change and are widely reported to alter mosquito population dynamics. However, the direction, magnitude, and consistency of this effect across mosquito species and flood contexts remain poorly studied. This systematic review synthesizes empirical evidence on mosquito species population responses to disastrous flood events [...]
Reproduction is more sensitive to warming than adult lifespan across invertebrates
Published: 2026-08-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Population Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Studies estimating the effect of temperature on wild animal populations typically focus on survival as a proxy for population health. However, high and low temperatures can also negatively influence animal reproduction, and recent work suggests that the thermal sensitivity of reproduction is more important for population persistence that the thermal sensitivity of survival in some species groups. [...]
How (not) to study insect microbiota in the age of high-throughput sequencing
Published: 2026-08-06
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Environmental Microbiology and Microbial Ecology Life Sciences
The recognition of microbiota as a critical component of insect biology and evolution has driven a rapid expansion of insect-microbe interaction research. Yet while high-throughput sequencing has democratized access to microbial community profiling, it has also normalized low-resolution, artifact-prone approaches that often yield limited biological insights. Insects pose distinct challenges for [...]
Life-history traits do not always evolve in response to changing thermal environments
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Integrative Biology, Zoology
Quantifying animals' capacity to evolve in response to changing environments is central to predicting ecological responses to climate change. However, empirical evidence for evolutionary responses to changing temperatures remains mixed, and we know little about how selection alters trait variance or generates trade-offs among traits. Here, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 44 [...]
Continental breeding hotspots of migratory monarch butterflies revealed by coordinated community science partnership
Published: 2026-07-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
The eastern migratory monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus) has declined by more than 80% over the past two decades, highlighting the need for improved understanding of its breeding ecology. To address longstanding gaps in continental-scale data on monarch reproduction, the International Monarch Monitoring Blitz has mobilized community scientists across North America to monitor monarch [...]
Insects as agents of national security: entomological biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse in agriculture and forestry threaten geopolitical stability
Published: 2026-07-02
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Biosecurity, Entomology, Forest Management, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration
1. In early 2026, the UK Government published a report assessing how global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse represent systematic threats to UK national security through cascading impacts to food security, land use and climate-related feedbacks. 2. Recontextualising biodiversity and ecosystem health as determinants of national security offers a novel perspective on long observed [...]
Joint species distributions reveal crop type and field-specific assembly rules and idiosyncrasies in carabid beetle occurrences and abundances
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Designing effective biodiversity conservation and pest regulation strategies in agroecosystems requires understanding how environmental gradients and assembly rules jointly structure ecological communities. 2. We fitted a hurdle joint species distribution model (jSDM) to presence–absence and conditional abundance data of 20 carabid species sampled across 57 arable fields in three French [...]
Beyond mistakes: same-sex partner acceptance and broad mating filters coexist in termite pairing
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution
Same-sex sexual behavior is often interpreted either as a mistake arising from indiscriminate attempts or as an adaptive behavior directed towards same-sex partners. These explanations are typically considered mutually exclusive. Here we challenge this assumption using an adaptive same-sex pairing system in Reticulitermes termites. Long-term male-male pairings originate from tandem running, in [...]
EarthChirp: a global reference library for insect acoustic recognition and discovery across the audible and ultrasonic spectrum
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Genetics and Genomics
1. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is scaling rapidly, but automated recognition for insects lags far behind birds. The dominant recogniser (BirdNET) classifies only ~35 insect species and building bespoke insect classifiers requires labelled training data that does not exist for most taxa. 2. We present EarthChirp, a training-free recogniser for singing insects (Orthoptera and Cicadidae) [...]
History, challenges, and opportunities in the study of entomopathogenic fungi in tropical regions: Borneo as a model ecosystem
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Biodiversity, Entomology, Life Sciences, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Fungal pathogens tend to have a poor reputation as a disease among the general public and policy-makers. However, entomopathogenic fungi, adapted to infect and kill arthropod hosts, play a wide range of roles in ecosystems, provide key ecosystem services, and offer interesting models to understand pathogen interaction networks. Tropical regions provide especially favorable conditions for [...]
Four decades of inland invasion by Formosan subterranean termite in Alabama: expansion associated with transportation infrastructure
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Entomology
Invasive termites pose ecological and economic concerns as both cellulose-destroying pests and ecosystem engineers. The Formosan subterranean termite, Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki, is listed among the world's worst invasive species and has established invasive populations across continents. Most studies have emphasized their transoceanic international dispersal and establishment in the coastal [...]