Preprints
There are 2376 Preprints listed.
Experimental evolution of a mammalian holobiont: the genetic and maternal effects in bank voles selected for herbivorous capability
Published: 2024-07-17
Subjects: Life Sciences
Mammalian herbivory represents a complex adaptation requiring evolutionary changes across all levels of biological organization, from molecules to morphology to behavior. Explaining the evolution of such complex traits represents a major challenge in biology, simultaneously muddled and enlightened by a growing awareness of the crucial role of symbiotic associations in shaping organismal [...]
Mate-switching is not associated with offspring fitness in a socially monogamous bird
Published: 2024-07-16
Subjects: Life Sciences
In many species, individuals form socially monogamous pair-bonds lasting multiple breeding seasons, or even whole lifetimes. Studies often suggest social monogamy to be adaptive, but this is usually quantified through the survival and annual reproductive success of the partners. However, beyond the number of offspring produced, parental partnerships may also affect their offspring’s phenotype, [...]
gibbonNetR: an R Package for the Use of Convolutional Neural Networks for Automated Detection of Acoustic Data
Published: 2024-07-14
Subjects: Life Sciences
Automated detection of acoustic signals is crucial for effective monitoring of vocal animals and their habitats across large spatial and temporal scales. Recent advances in deep learning have made high performance automated detection approaches accessible to more practitioners. However, there are few deep learning approaches that can be implemented natively in R. The 'torch for R' ecosystem has [...]
Competition for pollen deposition space on pollinators generates last-male advantage
Published: 2024-07-12
Subjects: Life Sciences
Many plants have precise pollen placement strategies so that large amounts of pollen can be found over very small and discrete areas located on pollinators. This may lead to male-male competition if pre-existing pollen (1) is smothered or displaced by pollen from subsequent male flowers or (2) prevents subsequent pollen from attaching to pollinators. We investigated these alternative hypotheses [...]
Measuring the edges of species’ geographic ranges
Published: 2024-07-12
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. The fundamental unit of spatial ecology is a species range: the geographic area that it occupies. Species ranges are delineated by range edges (also known as boundaries or limits). Why range edges occur where they do and not elsewhere, and what makes them move, has been an active area of research since the 19th century. In the present day, range edge dynamics are an important metric of [...]
Evaluation of livelihoods programming in Biodiversity Challenge Funds projects
Published: 2024-07-12
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Economics
The UK government's Biodiversity Challenge Funds (BCF; including Darwin Initiative, Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund, and Darwin Plus) have funded hundreds of conservation projects across the Global South since the early 1990s. Increasingly, these projects include goals relating to human livelihoods, recognising the complex interrelationships between poverty reduction and biodiversity [...]
Exposure to lead (Pb) contamination paradoxically heightens predator avoidance behaviours in an urban bird
Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Animal Sciences
To survive, prey animals must correctly assess and respond to predation, by vigilantly scanning their environment for threats, assessing predation risk through gaze aversion (responding fearfully to predator gaze), and escaping efficiently. As these anti-predatory behaviours are integrated through the nervous and motor systems, they could be disrupted by neurotoxic contaminants, such as lead [...]
A pattern-oriented simulation for forecasting species spread through time and space: A case study on an ecosystem engineer on the move
Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Modelling the spread of introduced ecosystem engineers is a conservation priority due to their potential to cause irreversible ecosystem-level changes. Existing models predict potential distributions and spread capacities, but new approaches that simulate the trajectory of a species’ spread over time are needed. We have developed novel simulations that predict spatial and temporal spread, [...]
Marine resources alter tundra food web dynamics by subsidizing a terrestrial predator on the sea ice
Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Predator use of resource subsidies can strengthen top-down effects on prey when predators respond numerically to subsidies. Although allochthonous subsidies are generally transported along natural gradients, consumers can cross ecosystem boundaries to acquire subsidies, thereby linking disparate ecosystems. In coastal Arctic ecosystems, terrestrial predators like Arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus) [...]
Blindingly Transparent – Anonymity in an Era of Openness: A Reply to Cardini
Published: 2024-07-11
Subjects: Life Sciences
We welcome and appreciate the comment from Cardini [1] on our “ABC of academic writing” [2]. Cardini rightly points out that some of our advice could lead to revealing one’s identity inadvertently, jeopardising the double-blind peer review process. Importantly, there is a wealth of evidence that the effectiveness of double-blind review can prevent biases resulting from traditional single-blind [...]
Ancestral state reconstruction of phenotypic characters
Published: 2024-07-09
Subjects: Evolution
Ancestral state reconstruction is a phylogenetic comparative method that involves estimating the unknown trait values of hypothetical ancestral taxa at internal nodes of a phylogenetic tree. Ancestral state reconstruction has long been, and continues to remain, among the most popular analyses in phylogenetic comparative research. In this review, I illustrate the theory and practice of ancestral [...]
Social ageing varies within a population of bottlenose whales
Published: 2024-07-08
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Evolution, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
How social behaviour changes as individuals age has important consequences for the health and function of both human and non-human societies. However, the extent of inter-individual variation in social ageing has been underappreciated, especially in natural populations of animals. Here, we leverage a photo-identification dataset spanning 35 years to examine social ageing in an Endangered [...]
The Genomics for Australian Plants (GAP) framework initiative – developing genomic resources for understanding the evolution and conservation of the Australian flora.
Published: 2024-07-08
Subjects: Biodiversity, Botany, Genomics
The generation and analysis of genome-scale data—genomics—is driving a rapid increase in plant biodiversity knowledge. However, the speed and complexity of technological advance in genomics presents challenges for its widescale use in evolutionary and conservation biology. Here, we introduce and describe a national-scale collaboration conceived to build genomic resources and capability for [...]
Variation in the diversity of Sotalia (Cetacea:Delphinidae) dolphin whistle repertoires at a continental scale
Published: 2024-07-08
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
1. While cetaceans are known to produce large and complex acoustic repertoires, the challenges of exhaustively sampling sounds at sea and counting relevant signals has precluded an understanding of their true repertoire diversity. 2. Here we quantify and compare the whistle repertoires of 16 populations in the genus Sotalia, belonging to two sister species, the Guiana dolphin (Sotalia [...]
Non-compliance and Under-performance in Australian Human-induced Regeneration Projects
Published: 2024-07-04
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The ‘boom-and-bust’ nature of rangeland ecosystems makes them ill-suited to nature-based solution (NbS) carbon offset projects involving sequestration in vegetation and soils. The variability in these systems makes it difficult to determine whether observed carbon stock changes are attributable to project activities, creating additionality risks. The low and variable rainfall in rangelands also [...]