Skip to main content

Preprints

There are 2563 Preprints listed.

Lateralisation shapes spatial learning in lizards

Daniele Pellitteri-Rosa, Birgit Szabo, Andrea Gazzola

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Biology, Evolution, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Spatial memory is fundamental cognitive process that allows animals to navigate and interact with their environment effectively. While extensively studied in mammals and birds, the mechanisms underlying spatial cognition in reptiles remain less understood. In this study, we investigated spatial learning and the potential influence of behavioural lateralisation in the common wall lizard (Podarcis [...]

Challenges for small island developing states in meeting monitoring requirements of the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework

Philip JK McGowan, Anik Jarvis, Helena Jeffrey Brown, et al.

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Biodiversity

The Kunming Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity is an ambitious agreement to halt the decline in the world’s biodiversity by 2030 and restore nature by 2050. In order to measure progress towards the Framework’s Goals and Targets, a monitoring framework has been established and this includes 26 headline indicators and 71 questions [...]

High-resolution range mapping of mycorrhizal fungal species reveals systematic biases in their protection

Clara Qin, Sujai Kumar, Jinsu Elhance, et al.

Published: 2025-08-31
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies

Mycorrhizal fungi are essential to ecosystem functioning but have been overlooked in conservation agendas due to data limitations and a historical focus on plants and animals. We present the first global, species-level assessment of the area-based conservation of mycorrhizal fungi. Using 16.5 million site-by-taxon presence–absence records, we created high-resolution range maps for 189 arbuscular [...]

Ecological Kinetics and Evolutionary Dynamics of Antibiotic Resistance in Complex Environments

Fernando Baquero, Teresa M Coque, Jeronimo Rodríguez-Beltrán, et al.

Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are common in the natural environment, including the microbiota of animal and human hosts. The local physical, chemical, and biological conditions of environmental patches and matrices vary in both qualitative and quantitative aspects. Often, these conditions diffuse in gradients, creating intersections that can either facilitate or inhibit the spread and evolution [...]

The myth of the metabolic baseline: how sleep-wake cycles undermine a foundational assumption in organismal biology

Helena Norman, Daphne Cortese, Amelia Munson, et al.

Published: 2025-08-28
Subjects: Animal Experimentation and Research, Biochemistry, Biophysics, and Structural Biology, Biology, Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology, Life Sciences, Physiology, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Zoology

Basal and standard metabolic rates (BMR and SMR) are cornerstones of physiological ecology and are assumed to be relatively fixed intrinsic properties of organisms that represent the minimum energy required to sustain life. However, this assumption is conceptually flawed. Many core maintenance processes underlying SMR are temporally partitioned across sleep and wakefulness and are not [...]

Frequent shifts in pollination strategy are decoupled from diversification in the terrestrial orchids

Jamie B Thompson, Eric Robert Hagen, Elizabeth Anne Forward, et al.

Published: 2025-08-27
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Biology, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences, Plant Sciences

Pollinator attraction strategies are central to orchid reproductive biology and have long been hypothesised to accelerate speciation rates, particularly through specialised coevolutionary interactions. However, most macroevolutionary evidence comes from studies of individual genera or tribes, leaving broad-scale patterns unresolved. Here, we reconstruct the evolution of pollination strategy in [...]

Habitual tool use on monopolizable resources affects group cohesion

Zoë Goldsborough, Margaret Crofoot, Julián León, et al.

Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology

Tool-aided extractive foraging changes animals’ interactions with their environment by expanding access to novel and/or high-quality foods. If and how habitual reliance on tool use impacts animals’ social dynamics is less understood. If materials for tool use are monopolizable, tool use might increase intragroup competition. While higher intragroup competition encourages greater group spread, [...]

Modelling complex habitat use for threatened bat species decision-making in landscapes with competing priorities

Robyn E Shaw, Linette Umbrello, Chris Knuckey, et al.

Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Zoology

Species distribution models (SDMs) provide valuable information to aid conservation decisions, particularly in landscapes where economic and biodiversity priorities compete. Generating SDMs for species that rely on discrete habitat types for different activities (e.g. roosting or foraging) can be challenging, and result in outputs that are not appropriately tailored for end use. We collated [...]

Cell Wall Bioactive Molecules as Signaling and Effector Agents in Bacterial Physiology and Virulence

Fernando Baquero, Juan A. Ayala, Rafael Cantón

Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Life Sciences, Medicine and Health Sciences

The molecules that make up the bacterial cell wall should be seen not only as passive structural components of the murein sacculus that protect and enclose the inner membrane containing the bacterial cytoplasm. They are also active bioactive molecules released during bacterial replication, especially after cell lysis, leading to a deconstructive process. These molecules vary in structure from [...]

Long-read sequencing for biodiversity analyses - a comprehensive guide

Iliana Bista, Alexandra Lino

Published: 2025-08-26
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Genetics and Genomics, Life Sciences

DNA-based monitoring of biodiversity has revolutionised our ability to describe communities and rapidly assess anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity. Currently established molecular methods for biomonitoring rely heavily on classic metabarcoding utilising short reads, mostly through Illumina data. However, increasingly more studies use long-read sequencing technologies, such as Oxford Nanopore [...]

Fast evolving flowers drive cactus diversification

Jamie B Thompson, Chris Venditti

Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Life Sciences

The rise of biodiversity is shaped by variation in diversification rates. Across the Tree of Life, numerous forces are thought to influence these rates, including the evolution of adaptive traits, climate change, and interactions with other organisms. In the flowering plants, a longstanding hypothesis favoured by Darwin suggests that floral evolution is a driving force for plant diversity. [...]

Social and economic consequences of prestige and dominance in rural Colombian social networks

Daniel Redhead, Arlenys Hurtado Manyoma, Danier Hurtado Manyoma, et al.

Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Social status regulates influence and well-being in most social-animals. In humans, social status can be attained via two distinct routes: prestige (freely-conferred deference, typically tracking the ability of individuals to confer benefits) and dominance (fear-based deference, typically tracking the ability of individuals to inflict costs). While prestige and dominance are well-studied from a [...]

Genomic characteristics of root-knot nematodes: a major group of crop pests

Ana Paula Zotta Mota, Etienne GJ Danchin

Published: 2025-08-22
Subjects: Life Sciences

Nematodes constitute one of the most species-rich groups of animals, only paralleled by arthropods. They have a worldwide distribution being present in many biomes from deep sea sediments to deserts. Around 15% of them parasitize plants and they cause enormous damage to the global agricultural production despite the control methods deployed. Among those, the root-knot nematodes (genus [...]

Herbarium specimens reveal long-term decline in pollination services since in the 1970s

Bofeng Song, Heidi Zimmer, Mark Clements, et al.

Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Natural Resources and Conservation, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Plant Biology, Plant Sciences

Anthropogenic change has resulted in pollinator decline and altered plant-pollinator interactions. This may drive widespread declines in pollination and reproductive success of plants, yet few datasets allow us to track changes in pollination services over time. Herbaria provide a unique opportunity to assess pollination services across broad spatial and temporal scales, and the associated [...]

Observation methods in animal behaviour: a simulation study of performance

Alexander Mielke, Camille Testard, Alba Motes-Rodrigo, et al.

Published: 2025-08-21
Subjects: Animal Studies, Biological Psychology, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Most behavioural studies rely on systematic samples of behaviour, as observing and recording all behavioural events that occur is rarely feasible. Choosing an observation method involves several key decisions, including which individuals to observe, how to sample their behaviour, and how to distribute sampling effort over time. These decisions influence how closely behavioural estimates reflect [...]

search

You can search by:

  • Title
  • Keywords
  • Author Name
  • Author Affiliation