Preprints
There are 3394 Preprints listed.
Capsicum pubescens Ruiz & Pav.: evolutionary history, genetic resources and future opportunities for an overlooked Andean chile
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Growing concerns over food security, agrobiodiversity loss, and climate change are driving renewed interest in neglected and underutilized crops with high agronomic, nutritional, and adaptive potential. Capsicum pubescens Ruiz & Pav. is one of the five domesticated chile pepper species and a distinctive crop of Andean agriculture. Adapted to cool mountain environments and characterized by its [...]
A new computational framework for speeding up the fitting of multistate capture–mark–recapture models
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
1. Multistate capture–mark–recapture (CMR) models are widely used to estimate the parameters governing demographic processes such as survival, dispersal, and recruitment in animal populations. In Bayesian analyses, the multinomial likelihood of multistate CMR models summarizes individual encounter histories into groups defined by states and capture occasions, and is regarded as a computationally [...]
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 [...]
Tree species richness and forest structure influence vertebrate scavenging
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Forest Management
Tree species richness can alter forest structure and resource availability, often enhancing ecosystem functioning. However, biodiversity–ecosystem functioning research has largely focused on plant-mediated processes, leaving it unclear whether vertebrate-mediated functions such as carrion scavenging respond similarly to tree species richness. We investigated how tree species richness, canopy [...]
Droplet-induced surface aeration, not acoustic sensing, most parsimoniously explains accelerated germination of submerged rice seeds
Published: 2026-06-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
When water drops strike the surface above submerged rice seeds, the seeds germinate faster, an effect that scales with drop height and falls off sharply with distance. Makris and Navarro1 attributed this to acoustic stimulation of statoliths, specialised gravity-sensing organelles, suggesting seeds can effectively sense the sound of raindrops. Here I argue that a simpler, well-established [...]
In-silico evaluation of aspartate therapy for lactic acidosis in Alligator mississippiensis
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Computational Biology, Systems and Integrative Physiology Life Sciences
Hyperlactatemia, and/or lactic acidosis, is a common complication in wildlife due to the sensitivity of these species to capture induce complications. The treatment of lactic acidosis in humans is equally as controversial as in veterinary medicine. Stabilisation of blood pH during lactic acidosis is difficult to achieve. Crocodilians, such as the American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), [...]
Structural and functional skin microbiota on cane toads across 16,000 km of invaded range
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Host-associated microbial communities are shaped by environmental availability, host filtering, microbial interactions, and prior pathogen exposure, with connected habitats promoting greater adaptive microbiome potential. Across the invasive range of cane toads, containing expansive disconnects between populations, we found strong spatial variation in skin bacterial communities, including among [...]
The Fish Fauna of Tubbataha Reefs is highly Biodiverse and distinctively Oceanic
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Zoology
We surveyed the fish fauna of Tubbataha Reefs, a remote and well-protected coral reef system in the Philippines. Tubbataha is located in the Coral Triangle, the region with the highest marine biodiversity in the world, and is a no-take marine protected area. We found a total of 534 species, with the Labridae (65 species), Pomacentridae (60 species), Gobiidae (60 species), Chaetodonidae (33 [...]
Visual-chemotactic saltatory search in Octopus hummelincki (Mollusca, Cephalopoda): a case study in the South Atlantic
Published: 2026-06-23
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
We report for the first time evidence of foraging by Octopus hummelincki and analyze it using saltatory search theory, which posits alternating phases of locomotion and stationary search. Our data showed that substrate complexity dictates behavioral transitions: locomotion predominated in sand, whereas solid substrates elicited tactile exploration. The move-to-search scaling ratio (0.63) aligns [...]
robust.prioritizr: Robust Systematic Conservation Prioritization
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
1. Climate change poses significant threats to biodiversity. To ensure the long-term persistence of species, protected areas must be established in locations that will safeguard suitable habitats in the future. Although statistical models can predict where such habitats may occur under different future scenarios, designing protected areas that can effectively protect these habitats across a wide [...]
Body condition, but not reproductive success, is associated with sociality in a colonial seabird.
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences, Marine Biology, Ornithology, Zoology
Body condition, breeding habitat quality and access to socially acquired information are generally associated with higher fitness in social animals. In colonial species that breed in dense aggregations, such as seabirds, the combined effects of these factors on reproductive success have rarely been tested together. In this study, we investigated the relationship between fledging success, body [...]
Governing for Learning: Institutional Foundations of Effective Adaptive Management
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Life Sciences
Adaptive management (AM) remains one of the most promising frameworks for managing conservation challenges under uncertainty, yet its potential is rarely realized in practice. Conservation agencies routinely make repeated decisions under uncertainty, but those decisions are often not structured in ways that allow learning to accumulate and improve future choices. This Perspectives article argues [...]
Algorithmically-controlled ecosystems and biodiversity
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Life Sciences
Algorithmically-controlled ecosystems are ecosystems in which at least one key process rate or property (e.g. biodiversity) is under control by algorithms, or if ecosystems contain robots/ machines. Algorithmic influence on ecosystems will be matter of degree, and we highlight the risks and opportunities of such algorithm-influenced ecosystems, as well as the need to have discussions about [...]
From Footprints to Handprints: Principles for Assessing an Organisation’s Positive Impacts on Biodiversity
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Biodiversity
Organisations are increasingly acknowledging their responsibility to ‘bend the curve of biodiversity loss’ by reducing negative biodiversity impacts, often referred to as biodiversity footprints. A growing number of organisations are also interested in highlighting the positive impacts they have on biodiversity, driven by research, innovation and lobbying, for example. Limited guidance currently [...]
A mathematical foundation of modelling thermal injury and repair dynamics in ectotherms
Published: 2026-06-18
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Evolution, Life Sciences, Physiology, Plant Sciences, Population Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Statistical Models, Statistics and Probability, Survival Analysis
As global temperatures rise and extreme heat events impair ectotherm performance and survival, it is becoming increasingly important to predict how organisms accumulate and repair thermal injury under realistic benign and stressful temperatures. The thermal death time (TDT) model quantifies how heat events translate into thermal injury, but under natural temperature fluctuations the TDT model is [...]