Preprints
There are 2709 Preprints listed.
The age of change: social aging in dolphins
Published: 2025-10-27
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Recent work has unearthed strong relationships between aging and average sociability. Clear patterns of decreases in average sociability are observed across taxa, many of these are sex-specific. Individuals, however, generally deviate from population averages, and discounting individual variance in behaviour could disguise mechanisms of adaptation, selection, and developmental stability. Here, we [...]
Unravelling drivers of forest biodiversity: Contrasting effects of mean environmental conditions, environmental heterogeneity and landscape context
Published: 2025-10-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
1. Understanding how biodiversity varies under different environmental conditions is one of the central aims of ecology. Mean environmental conditions and heterogeneity have an effect on biodiversity. Increased heterogeneity is generally associated with increased diversity, but mean conditions tend to have a stronger influence. Conditions on site are embedded into a landscape context, which adds [...]
Seasonal warming drives epidermal shedding in northern bottlenose whales
Published: 2025-10-24
Subjects: Integrative Biology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Animals move for access to better conditions, resources, or mating opportunities. However, evidence from cetaceans suggests that some long-distance travel to warmer waters may be primarily related to physiological maintenance, specifically the shedding of epidermal diatoms and parasites. Here we test this “physiological maintenance hypothesis” for cetacean movement from a new angle, asking [...]
Unsung Songbirds: Advances in the Study of Corvid Communication
Published: 2025-10-24
Subjects: Life Sciences
Historically, much research in animal communication has focused on the information content and ultimate function of vocalisations. These include defending territories, sounding the alarm, attracting mates, and advertising identity. The proximate mechanisms that shape signal production and perception—including cognitive processes and cultural transmission—have only recently started attracting [...]
Kin selection and sexual conflict shape variation in breastfeeding duration
Published: 2025-10-24
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Breastfeeding provides substantial benefits to infants, yet mothers frequently cease breastfeeding earlier than health guidelines recommend. In cooperative breeding systems, maternal decisions such as the duration of breastfeeding are influenced not only by her own costs and benefits, but also by those of other household members, which are weighed by their relatedness to the child and the [...]
Population and Evolutionary Genomics of Lizards and Snakes
Published: 2025-10-23
Subjects: Life Sciences
With an extraordinary diversity in body plans, colour patterns and lifestyles, and over 12,000 living species, squamate reptiles (lizards, snakes, and amphisbaenians) provide unparalleled opportunities to apply genomic tools for answering biological questions. From desert runners to rainforest climbers, high-mountain dwellers to sea snakes, squamates have repeatedly evolved remarkable [...]
The role of socially transferred materials in translating and mediating the effects of global change
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Almost all animal species transfer endogenously produced substances to conspecifics, either horizontally or vertically, through eggs, seminal fluid, milk, or other specialized materials. These socially transferred materials (STMs) can have substantial evolutionary consequences, are exceptionally plastic, and may enable organisms to adapt to environmental change. The world is facing rapid [...]
Faster growing and more functionally diverse: global change alters functional trait composition of mountain plant communities in the European Alps
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Life Sciences
Understanding how global change reshapes mountain plant communities is essential for predicting biodiversity and ecosystem function in a warming world. Using resurvey data from over 1,400 alpine and subalpine vegetation plots across the European Alps, we show that community-weighted means of key functional traits – specific leaf area, leaf nitrogen, and seed mass – have increased significantly [...]
Automated insect monitoring with camera traps is transforming ecological understanding
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences
Addressing global declines in insect biodiversity requires both ecological restoration and high-quality monitoring data. While long-term participatory schemes have been foundational, recent advances in automated recording and AI-based identification offer transformative but undocumented potential. Here, we show how leveraging insect camera traps, deep learning models and statistics drives a [...]
Sexual stings in scorpions - knock-out drug or love potion?
Published: 2025-10-22
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Biology, Life Sciences
Conspecific male to female envenomation, though rare, has been documented across venomous taxa. While traditionally interpreted as a coercive mating strategy to enhance male reproductive success and to avoid cannibalism, this explanation may not fully account for the behaviour in scorpions, which exhibit minor sexual size dimorphism and complex courtship rituals. This review explores the possibly [...]
Resolving Indirect Effects of Large Herbivores on Terrestrial Ecosystem Functioning
Published: 2025-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
The world’s large herbivores play outsized roles in shaping ecosystem processes like primary production, decomposition, and mineralization. Contemporary management of these animals is therefore poised to be a powerful tool for holistic ecosystem management. Yet we currently lack (i) adequate understanding of indirect interactions underlying herbivore control of ecosystem processes, especially [...]
Global offsetting of the outsourced biodiversity footprint of consumption
Published: 2025-10-21
Subjects: Life Sciences
International trade outsources environmental impacts of consumption through complex value chains causing biodiversity loss across Earth. There is a need to examine the negative biodiversity impacts and the opportunities to mitigate and offset the impacts, as a global systemic phenomenon. Traditional biodiversity offsetting is used to offset local land use impacts but no means to offset the [...]
Reflections on an essential but elusive ecological metaphor: The Hutchinsonian niche
Published: 2025-10-20
Subjects: Life Sciences
The Hutchinsonian niche, a pervasive metaphor in ecology, is a sister concept to Sewall Wright’s adaptive landscape, with a shared focus on fitness. Characterizing what fitness means (and how to measure it) is a fundamental conceptual issue in both evolutionary biology and ecology. After a brief overview of adaptive landscapes and issues with fitness, this essay contrasts G.E. Hutchinson’s [...]
SEICAT+: a comprehensive assessment framework for positive socio-economic impacts of alien species
Published: 2025-10-20
Subjects: Agricultural and Resource Economics, Agricultural Economics, Biodiversity, Community-based Research, Demography, Population, and Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Despite their recognized harms to humans and biodiversity, alien species outside of domestication/cultivation can also provide socio-economic benefits, which are essential to consider when identifying stakeholder conflicts and informing managers and policymakers. These benefits often result from the enhancement of ecosystem services, such as the provision of food, timber, and other natural [...]
Biogeography of crop progenitors and wild plant resources in the terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene of West Asia, 14.7–8.3 ka
Published: 2025-10-17
Subjects: Desert Ecology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology
This paper presents the first continuous, spatially-explicit reconstructions of the palaeodistributions of 65 plant species found regularly in association with early agricultural archaeological sites in West Asia, including the progenitors of the first crops. We used machine learning to train an ecological niche model of each species based on its present-day distribution in relation to climate [...]