Preprints
There are 3154 Preprints listed.
Human Homosexuality, Transsexuality and Evolution: A Critical Appraisal
Published: 2026-04-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
Homosexual behavior occurs naturally in many species of mammals. Among primates, homosexuality is an evolutionary innovation originating when the anthropoid lineage split from the prosimian linage, becoming prominent in socially complex old world primates. Many species possess multiple genders: multiple morphs within each sex. Homosexual behavior and transgender expression occur across all [...]
Amphibian communities are structured by local habitat quality in garden ponds and spatial factors in urban ponds
Published: 2026-04-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Amphibians are among the most threatened vertebrates, and urbanisation contributes to their decline through habitat loss, fragmentation, pollution, and the spread of invasive species. At the same time, urban freshwater habitats, such as ponds, can serve as important refuges within highly modified landscapes. While the role of urban ponds in supporting freshwater biodiversity is increasingly [...]
Heterogeneity in Statistics: A Conceptual and Methodological Review
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Heterogeneity—the presence of meaningful variation across observations, in models, and in inferences—is a foundational concept in statistics that has many meanings. This review synthesizes the evolution of the meanings, methodologies, and interpretations of the four dominant and interconnected types of heterogeneity: (1) heteroscedasticity (non-constant variance), historically treated as a [...]
Sample size shapes metabarcoding-driven biodiversity assessments across body sizes in soil
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Life Sciences
Understanding how sample size influences biodiversity detection across taxonomic groups differing in body size is critical for designing robust and cost-efficient metabarcoding studies of soil eukaryotes. Using a soil mass gradient (0.25-32 g) combined with a universal 18S rRNA metabarcoding approach, we quantified how sample mass shapes diversity estimates across eukaryotic taxa. Diversity [...]
Silver spoon effect: Natal noise exposition is associated with telomere dynamics in adult birds
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology
Anthropogenic noise disturbance on wildlife is of growing concern. Environmental noise exposure during incubation can negatively impact fitness in wild birds. Here, we hypothesised that chronic noise introduces stress through oxidative damage to embryos, reflected in short-term fitness reduction and long-term physiological changes. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the effects of chronic [...]
Older forests recover faster: leaf litter arthropods reveal post-perturbation recolonization dynamics
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how ecological communities recover from disturbance is central to predicting ecosystem resilience, particularly in tropical forests where biodiversity and ecosystem functioning are tightly linked. Such landscapes are dominated by secondary forests that have experienced, and continue to experience, disturbances of varying intensity. Leaf litter arthropods play a crucial role in [...]
drmr: A Bayesian approach to Dynamic Range Models in R
Published: 2026-04-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Predicting how species distributions will respond to environmental change is a critical challenge. Dynamic Range Models (DRMs) offer a powerful mechanistic approach by explicitly modeling the influence of environmental drivers on demographic processes. However, the widespread adoption of DRMs has been hindered by their inherent complexity and a critical gap in the available software. While many [...]
The Evolution of Interdependent Cell Cycles During the Transition to Multicellularity
Published: 2026-04-13
Subjects: Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In the evolution of complex multicellular organisms, cells that were once autonomous became obligately dependent on one another for survival and reproduction. Despite its importance, the process by which autonomous cellular machinery was restructured into obligately interdependent networks is poorly understood. Addressing this gap requires a framework that clearly categorizes the different levels [...]
Anti-obesity therapeutics potential of plant genetic resources of Bangladesh and their conservation at Bangladesh Agricultural University Botanical Garden
Published: 2026-04-13
Subjects: Life Sciences
Obesity, a global health issue affecting 650 million people, leads to chronic diseases and health impairments. Anti-obesity drugs are expensive and may cause side effects, raising significant concerns. One hundred eighty-eight medicinal plant species from 157 genera and 62 families in Bangladesh exhibit anti-obesity activity. Fabaceae (syn. Leguminosae) is the largest family, consisting of 25 [...]
An Evaluation of 15 Years of Community-Based Monitoring in Forest Stewardship Council Certified Forest Areas in Southern Tanzania: Insights from Mammal and Indicator Bird Species
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Community-based Research, Forest Management
Certified community-managed forests are rare in East Africa, and the use of community-based biomonitoring to track biodiversity change in such forests is rarer still. We analyse 15 years of community-collected data on mammals and indicator bird species from 10 village land forest reserves in southern coastal Tanzania, managed under a Forest Stewardship Council certification scheme facilitated by [...]
An energetic unification of ecological theory
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Ecological communities can persist for long periods despite strong competition and environmental variability, yet they can also reorganize or collapse abruptly after seemingly modest change. Explaining persistence, diversity, and collapse has produced several major traditions in ecology, including species-interaction models, consumer--resource theory, coexistence theory, feasibility analysis, and [...]
Acute bacterial challenge in Drosophila reveals age and sex dependent feeding and macronutrient choice without generalised anorexia
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Entomology, Integrative Biology, Zoology
Sickness behaviours are often interpreted as adaptive host responses that reallocate resources from performance to defence. Anorexia - a reduction in food intake - is one of the most frequently cited examples, yet evidence across insects is variable and rarely separates the effects of wounding, immune stimulation, and live infection. Here we use a factorial design in Drosophila melanogaster to [...]
Molecular identification and diversity assessment of Tyrrhenian Romulea species (iridaceae)
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Plant Sciences
Taxonomic assignments based only on morphology are often insufficient for delimiting species, particularly in polyploid complexes with extensive morphological overlap. This limitation hinders biogeographic and conservation issues. The genus Romulea (Iridaceae), distributed across Africa and the Mediterranean Basin, exemplifies this challenge. Despite its remarkable diversity, Mediterranean [...]
Microplastics and forest fungi: A review and call for comprehensive research
Published: 2026-04-10
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fungi are the main drivers of the global carbon and nutrient cycle and act as ecosystem engineers in forest ecosystems by regulating primary production and decomposition. Moreover, fungi are among the most diverse organisms in forest ecosystems and affect almost all forest microhabitats, from the canopy to the soil. In contrast to aquatic and agricultural ecosystems, forest ecosystems have [...]
A unified framework for phylogenetic and spatial meta-analysis: concepts, implementation, and practical guidance
Published: 2026-04-09
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Meta-analyses in ecology and evolution, and related fields, can include effect sizes structured by shared evolutionary history or spatial distance. In this tutorial paper, we show that phylogenetic and spatial meta-analyses can be formulated within the same theoretical framework based on correlated random effects. From this perspective, the two approaches differ only in how distance is defined: [...]