Preprints
There are 3809 Preprints listed.
Stridulation rate as a thermometer in Tettigonia viridissima: a season-long automated record and a test against archive recordings
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology
That an insect's song rate follows its temperature has been known since Dolbear proposed reading a cricket as a thermometer in 1897. The relation is not in doubt; its functional form is. Walker (1975a) found stridulation rate approximately linear in ten species of Orchelimum and, reanalysing fifteen published datasets, found linear fits better than exponential in thirteen — but his data were [...]
Elevation gradients shape morphology and acoustic phenotype across isolated songbird populations
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ornithology
Elevational gradients provide natural experiments for examining how environmental variation shapes animal phenotypes. In birds, geographic variation in body size may also influence song frequency because vocal production is constrained by morphology. We tested whether elevation and temperature are associated with coordinated variation in morphology and song frequency in Berthelot’s pipit (Anthus [...]
The acoustic structure and possible mechanical origin of the male Corncrake call
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
The male Corncrake Crex crex produces a distinctive repetitive call whose acoustic structure suggests a mechanically constrained sound-production system rather than a conventional tonal vocalisation. Here I describe observations obtained from approximately 800 field recordings made on Skye between 2020 and 2026 and develop a testable hypothesis for the origin of the long-duration and repetitive [...]
Dietary models of primate brain evolution omit the gut microbiome
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
DeCasien et al. reported that diet, rather than sociality, predicts relative brain size across primates, with frugivores having larger brains than folivores. Their interpretation moves the discussion from sociality towards ecology yet leaves the proposed energetic link biologically unspecified. The matter arising from this dietary framework is gut microbial metabolism, a plausible mechanistic [...]
Beyond the Vertebrate Model: Insights from Insect Stress Responses
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Animal Studies, Behavioral Neurobiology, Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Cell and Developmental Biology, Cellular and Molecular Physiology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Evolution, Genetics, Molecular Genetics, Systems Biology, Zoology
Stress responses are essential for survival, coordinating behavioural, physiological and molecular adjustments that enable organisms to cope with challenges. Most research has focused on vertebrates, leaving invertebrate stress physiology comparatively underexplored, particularly in insects. In this review, we compare insect and vertebrate stress responses to examine what insects reveal about the [...]
Geographic blind spots in an extreme environment microbiome catalog
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Jiang et al. present the Extreme Environment Microbiome Catalog (EEMC), comprising 78,213 bacterial and archaeal genomes, as a global resource for microbial diversity and antimicrobial discovery. Its scale and experimental peptide characterization are substantial contributions. However, a global framing requires evidence that regional data were systematically sought, rather than simply [...]
Bird community change only partially matches landscape habitat change across five decades in North America
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
A common expectation is that as habitats in a landscape change, so do communities within them. However, this niche-based expectation assumes species persist in their favored habitats regardless of how much habitat remains; geometric constraints can counter this when heterogeneous landscapes supply too little of each habitat type for specialists to persist, allowing generalists to dominate. Using [...]
Exploring fungal invasions: observational and theoretical insights and unanswered questions
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Despite invasive fungi’s dramatic effects on native biodiversity and ecosystem processes, the extent of fungal invasions and the mechanisms behind them are unclear. We address this gap by synthesizing documented global macrofungal invasions to assess which fungal traits and lifestyles contribute to invasions across fungal guilds. Specifically, we analyze global observations of non-native fungi to [...]
The Openness–Constraint Spectrum: Module Integrity and the Evolutionary Reversibility of Fungal Traits
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Life Sciences
Fungal traits differ sharply in whether evolution can retrace its steps. Hymenophore morphologies transition bidirectionally across phylogenies, whereas gasteroid fruiting bodies, arbuscular mycorrhizal symbioses, and obligate parasitism show little or no macroevolutionary return. We propose module integrity, the preservation state of a gene regulatory module relative to its ancestral baseline, [...]
Halophyte-associated salt-tolerant rhizobacteria: ecological adaptation, mechanistic pathways, and translational relevance for wheat salinity tolerance
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Background Soil salinization is an expanding constraint to agricultural productivity worldwide, particularly in irrigated and arid regions and strongly limits wheat growth and yield. Although breeding and biotechnology have produced cultivars with improved ion-exclusion and tissue-level tolerance, these advances alone do not fully mitigate salinity-induced disruptions in rhizosphere processes and [...]
Changepoint detection methods as a practical tool for assessment of ecological restoration
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Longitudinal Data Analysis and Time Series, Statistics and Probability
1. A key aim of many conservation initiatives is to induce a change, however detecting change from monitoring data can be challenging. Here, we introduce statistical methods for changepoint detection, demonstrating how this under-utilised analytical approach can provide practitioners and researchers insight and help in planning ecological restoration projects. 2. We show why it is important to [...]
Parasitism of an intertidal foundation species: Allometric scaling and environmental constraints on trematode distribution in barnacles across biological scales
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Parasites of foundation species, such as fucoids, mussels, and barnacles, can shape the intertidal communities that depend on them, yet their effects remain poorly understood. On rocky shores of the Northeast Pacific, the acorn barnacle Balanus glandula forms dense aggregations that provide habitat for other species. We investigated infection by the microphallid trematode Maritrema gratiosum in [...]
The Ecological Price of Segregation: Socioeconomic Stratification Structures Urban Bird and Vegetation Distribution
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
As income inequality rises, cities do not merely become less equal in aggregate; they also sort residents into increasingly separate neighborhoods, a spatial process known as socioeconomic segregation. Building on a companion study that documented the luxury effect in Bogotá using cadastral land value (Mutis & Armenteras, 2026), this analysis asks a distinct question: does the city's [...]
Feedbacks between human behavior, disease transmission, and vector ecology generate culture-linked dynamics in vector-borne diseases
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Epidemiology, Population Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Vector-borne diseases cause millions of deaths worldwide and are expanding into new regions and populations as climate change intensifies. Human behavior, shaped by social and cultural factors, is central to disease control, yet feedbacks among behavior, disease transmission, and vector ecology remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we develop a parsimonious malaria model coupling [...]
Understanding the Global Report on Collective Progress in the Implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: Purpose, Content, and Science-Policy Engagement
Published: 2026-10-14
Subjects: Biodiversity, Life Sciences
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), establishes four long-term 2050 goals, 23 action-oriented 2030 targets, and a standardized monitoring framework to track collective progress. The 2026 global review marks the first operational test of the Party-led planning, monitoring, reporting, and review (PMRR) mechanism, [...]