Preprints
There are 2515 Preprints listed.
Ecological Kinetics and Evolutionary Dynamics of Antibiotic Resistance in Complex Environments
Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are common in the natural environment, including the microbiota of animal and human hosts. The local physical, chemical, and biological conditions of environmental patches and matrices vary in both qualitative and quantitative aspects. Often, these conditions diffuse in gradients, creating intersections that can either facilitate or inhibit the spread and evolution [...]
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 [...]
Frequent shifts in pollination strategy are decoupled from diversification in the terrestrial orchids
Published: 2025-08-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences
Pollinator attraction strategies are central to orchid reproductive biology and have long been hypothesised to accelerate speciation rates, particularly through specialised coevolutionary interactions. However, most macroevolutionary evidence comes from studies of individual genera or tribes, leaving broad-scale patterns unresolved. Here, we reconstruct the evolution of pollination strategy in [...]
Habitual tool use on monopolizable resources affects group cohesion
Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology
Tool-aided extractive foraging changes animals’ interactions with their environment by expanding access to novel and/or high-quality foods. If and how habitual reliance on tool use impacts animals’ social dynamics is less understood. If materials for tool use are monopolizable, tool use might increase intragroup competition. While higher intragroup competition encourages greater group spread, [...]
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 [...]
Cell Wall Bioactive Molecules as Signaling and Effector Agents in Bacterial Physiology and Virulence
Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences
The molecules that make up the bacterial cell wall should be seen not only as passive structural components of the murein sacculus that protect and enclose the inner membrane containing the bacterial cytoplasm. They are also active bioactive molecules released during bacterial replication, especially after cell lysis, leading to a deconstructive process. These molecules vary in structure from [...]
Long-read sequencing for biodiversity analyses - a comprehensive guide
Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences
DNA-based monitoring of biodiversity has revolutionised our ability to describe communities and rapidly assess anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. Currently established molecular methods for biomonitoring rely heavily on classic metabarcoding utilising short reads, mostly through Illumina data. However, increasingly more studies use long-read sequencing technologies, such as Oxford Nanopore [...]
Fast evolving flowers drive cactus diversification
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
The rise of biodiversity is shaped by variation in diversification rates. Across the Tree of Life, numerous forces are thought to influence these rates, including the evolution of adaptive traits, climate change, and interactions with other organisms. In the flowering plants, a longstanding hypothesis favoured by Darwin suggests that floral evolution is a driving force for plant diversity. [...]
Social and economic consequences of prestige and dominance in rural Colombian social networks
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Social status regulates influence and well-being in most social-animals. In humans, social status can be attained via two distinct routes: prestige (freely-conferred deference, typically tracking the ability of individuals to confer benefits) and dominance (fear-based deference, typically tracking the ability of individuals to inflict costs). While prestige and dominance are well-studied from a [...]
Genomic characteristics of root-knot nematodes: a major group of crop pests
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Nematodes constitute one of the most species-rich groups of animals, only paralleled by arthropods. They have a worldwide distribution being present in many biomes from deep sea sediments to deserts. Around 15% of them parasitize plants and they cause enormous damage to the global agricultural production despite the control methods deployed. Among those, the root-knot nematodes (genus [...]
Herbarium specimens reveal long-term decline in pollination services since in the 1970s
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences
Anthropogenic change has resulted in pollinator decline and altered plant-pollinator interactions. This may drive widespread declines in pollination and reproductive success of plants, yet few datasets allow us to track changes in pollination services over time. Herbaria provide a unique opportunity to assess pollination services across broad spatial and temporal scales, and the associated [...]
Observation methods in animal behaviour: a simulation study of performance
Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biological Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Most behavioural studies rely on systematic samples of behaviour, as observing and recording all behavioural events that occur is rarely feasible. Choosing an observation method involves several key decisions, including which individuals to observe, how to sample their behaviour, and how to distribute sampling effort over time. These decisions influence how closely behavioural estimates reflect [...]
Sydney Phylogenetics Workshop: Lessons from the past 15 years
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Phylogenetic analysis forms an important component of research in the life sciences, enabling the study of evolutionary relationships, timescales, patterns, and processes. Phylogenetic trees are used in a wide variety of research fields, including molecular ecology, taxonomy and systematics, conservation genetics, and microbiology. Accordingly, there is a strong demand for accessible training in [...]
Changes in pollen production, pollen heteromorphism and ovule production with increased selfing in Viola arvensis
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Plant Biology, Population Biology
Embryos are largely understudied in conservation physiology
Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Physiology
Understanding how animals respond to environmental stressors across their life cycle is essential for predicting species’ vulnerability to climate change. Here, we systematically reviewed the literature to quantify the variation in research effort on different life stages in the field of conservation physiology. Specifically, we reviewed experimental studies measuring physiological and [...]