Preprints
There are 2169 Preprints listed.
Evolution under fluctuating conditions and exposure to heatwaves in the seed beetle, Callosobruchus maculatus
Published: 2025-03-24
Subjects: Evolution
Heatwaves, temporary periods of elevated temperatures, are increasing both in magnitude and in frequency and have been shown to have devastating negative effects on a wide range of taxa. However, to date, most studies investigating the impacts of heatwaves have either focus on populations that have evolved under constant conditions prior to assaying or, more importantly, only investigated the [...]
Leaf litter Decomposition dynamics across a Recovering Tropical Forest in the lowland Ecuadorian Chocó
Published: 2025-03-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Litter decomposition by arthropods, microbes, and fungi is a key ecosystem process in tropical forests, yet its response to forest disturbance and recovery remains poorly understood. To investigate decomposition dynamics across forest succession, we conducted an experiment in the Ecuadorian lowland Chocó (Esmeraldas) using a chronosequence approach. We deployed above- (AG) and belowground (BG) [...]
Quantifying macro-evolutionary patterns of trait mean and variance with phylogenetic location-scale models
Published: 2025-03-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences
Understanding how both the mean (location) and variance (scale) of traits differ among species and lineages is fundamental to unveiling macroevolutionary patterns. Yet, traditional phylogenetic comparative methods primarily focus on modelling mean trait values, often overlooking variability and heteroscedasticity that can provide critical insights into evolutionary dynamics. Here, we introduce [...]
Responses to climate change – insights and limitations from herbaceous plant model systems
Published: 2025-03-24
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Sciences
Herbaceous plant species have been the focus of extensive, long-term research into climate change responses, but there has been little effort to synthesize results and predicted outlooks from different model species. We summarize research on climate change responses for eight intensively-studied herbaceous plant species. We establish generalities across species, examine limitations, interrogate [...]
Social tethers: density-dependent social tethers inhibit fitness
Published: 2025-03-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
Putative mechanisms affecting fitness that underlie why animals occupy a particular place are often in tension. A tension amplified in social animals, where individuals are often not free to make independent habitat selection or foraging decisions. The ideal free distribution (IFD) is a density-dependent emergent property describing how individuals should distribute themselves to maximize fitness [...]
Seasonal dynamics of epifaunal communities on the Sargassum beds of the coast of Noto Peninsula, Japan
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Marine Biology
Epifaunal communities inhabiting seaweeds are key components of temperate rocky reef ecosystems, playing vital roles in nutrient cycling and biodiversity maintenance. However, limited research has addressed their seasonal dynamics in the semi-enclosed Sea of Japan. This study examined the seasonal changes in epifaunal communities associated with two dominant brown algae, Sargassum macrocarpum and [...]
Ten simple rules to follow when cleaning occurrence data in palaeobiology
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Paleobiology
Large datasets of fossil occurrences, often downloaded from online community-maintained databases, are a vital resource for understanding broad-scale evolutionary patterns, such as how biodiversity has changed through time and space. Such datasets, however, are not infallible and must be ‘cleaned’ of inaccurate, incomplete, or duplicate data prior to analysis. Researchers must decide upon the [...]
Inbreeding and high developmental temperatures affect cognition and boldness in guppies (Poecilia reticulata)
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Inbreeding impairs the cognitive abilities of humans, but its impact on cognition in other animals is poorly studied. For example, environmental stress (e.g. food limitation and extreme temperatures) often amplifies inbreeding depression in morphological traits, but whether cognition is similarly affected is unclear. We, therefore, tested if a higher temperature (30°C versus 26°C) during [...]
Paternity analysis reveals sexual selection on cognitive performance in mosquitofish
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
In many animal species, cognitive abilities are under strong natural selection because decisions about foraging, habitat choice and predator avoidance affect fecundity and survival. But how has sexual selection, which is usually stronger on males than females, shaped the evolution of cognitive abilities that influence success when competing for mates or fertilizations? We aimed to investigate [...]
Gene flow and vertical stratification of pollination in the bat-pollinated liana species Marcgravia longifolia
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Pollen dispersal is a key driver of gene flow in plant populations, shaping their spatial genetic structure (SGS). In tropical forests, plant-pollinator interactions vary across vertical strata due to differences in microclimate, resource availability, and foraging behavior. Bats, an important tropical pollinator group, have been observed to exhibit vertical stratification in their foraging [...]
Alike but still different: coexistence of four raptor species explained by breeding niche overlap
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Late Pleistocene faunal community patterns disrupted by Holocene human impacts
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Paleobiology
We analysed fossil mammal assemblages from over 350 Late Pleistocene and Holocene sites worldwide to test whether human activities, such as agriculture, domestication and intensified land use, restructured global patterns of mammal co-occurrence. Using presence-absence data, we contrasted a novel iterative ‘chase clustering’ method, which is compositionally driven, against a traditional spatially [...]
Anomaly detection in metabarcoding amplicon reads using an LSTM-CNN deep neural network ensemble (MetAnoDe)
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Metabarcoding has emerged as a critical tool in ecology and other scientific disciplines, facilitating species identification in diverse samples for biodiversity monitoring, community and microbiome analysis, dietary studies, and understanding species interactions. However, challenges arise from errors and artifacts introduced during laboratory processes such as PCR and sequencing. Manual [...]
Moth communities are more diverse in the understory than in the canopy of a tropical lowland rainforest in NW Ecuador
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
Tropical rainforests are the most species-rich terrestrial habitats and provide distinct niches for specialization and speciation, in part due to their vertical stratification. Stratification is observed in many insect orders as a result of abiotic factors, resource availability, and insect behavior. Here, we investigate the stratification of five clades of Lepidoptera: Erebidae-Arctiinae, [...]
How to Balance Conceptual Unity and Plurality: The Case of the Individualized Niche Concept
Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Life Sciences
Many philosophical discussions about biological concepts have focused on arguments for conceptual pluralism or monism, an approach that threatens to obscure the nuances of conceptual structure. We characterize the structure of the individualized niche concept based on the results of a qualitative empirical study we conducted within an interdisciplinary, biological research center. Our findings [...]