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Preprints

There are 2179 Preprints listed.

Seasonal dynamics of epifaunal communities on the Sargassum beds of the coast of Noto Peninsula, Japan

Keito Tsunoda, Yukimasa Higashide, Shouzo Ogiso, et al.

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

Lewis A. Jones, Christopher D. Dean, Bethany J. Allen, et al.

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)

Ivan M Vinogradov, Chenke Zang, Md Mahmud-Al-Hasan, et al.

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

Ivan M Vinogradov, Rebecca J Fox, Claudia Fichtel, et al.

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

Malika Gottstein, Sarina Thiel, Jan Lukas Vornhagen, et al.

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

Kai-Philipp Gladow, Jonas Beck, Patrick Benjamin Langthaler, et al.

Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences

Late Pleistocene faunal community patterns disrupted by Holocene human impacts

Barry W. Brook, S. Kathleen Lyons, Benjamin E. Carter, et al.

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)

Alexander Keller

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

Dennis Böttger, Ugo Mendes Diniz, Alexander Keller, et al.

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

Marie I. Kaiser, Katie H. Morrow

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 [...]

No evidence for assortative mating in the Atlantic puffin

Katja Helgeson Kochvar, Amy C Wilson, Rebecca K Foote, et al.

Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

Assortative mating occurs when individuals with similar phenotypes mate together more often than by chance and can contribute to increases in homozygosity, linkage disequilibrium between loci, and premating isolation in a phenotypically divergent population. While this phenomenon has been well documented in many avian species, evidence is relatively scarce in seabirds. Most seabirds are [...]

Increased Arctic fire occurrence related to human activity calls for improved management

Cengiz Akandil, Ramona Julia Heim, Elena Plekhanova, et al.

Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Arctic fires have become more frequent in recent decades. They release carbon to the atmosphere through burning organic material and degrading permafrost and thus accelerate global warming. Previous research highlighted climate variables as the driving factor of fire occurrence in the Arctic, largely ignoring the contribution of human activity. Here, we analyzed the relationship between fire [...]

Dragon Kill Points: applying a transparent working template to relieve authorship stress

April Robin Martinig, Spenser L. P. Burk, Szymon Marian Drobniak, et al.

Published: 2025-03-20
Subjects: Arts and Humanities, Business, Education, Engineering, Law, Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences

The concept of authorship, while straightforward in theory, proves to be remarkably complex in practice. While existing frameworks provide a foundation for classifying and ranking authorship roles, conflicts still arise when contributions are ambiguous or poorly documented. To address these issues, we propose Dragon Kill Points, adapted from multiplayer gaming, which tracks individual [...]

Recovery of forest structural complexity during secondary succession in the tropics

Martin Ehbrecht, Tim Lehmann, Sebastián Escobar, et al.

Published: 2025-03-19
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology

Forest structural complexity is an essential determinant of forest ecosystem functions and biodiversity. The natural dynamics of structural complexity of tropical forests remain largely unexplored, especially for naturally regenerating forest during secondary succession. Better understanding the trajectories of forest structural complexity recovery is crucial to inform the development of forest [...]

Social Learning and Culture in Birds: Emerging Patterns and Relevance to Conservation

Lucy Aplin, Ross Crates, Andrea Flack, et al.

Published: 2025-03-19
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

There is now abundant evidence for a role of social learning and culture in shaping behaviour in a range of avian species across multiple contexts, from migration routes in geese and foraging behaviour in crows, to passerine song. Recent emerging evidence has further linked culture to fitness outcomes in some birds, highlighting its potential importance for conservation. Here, we first summarise [...]

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