Biology subjects

Froese, T.

Publications and source records attributed to Froese, T..

7 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Evidence for the 1/e-law predicting optimal timing of reproduction across taxa

The timing of peak reproductive effort is a central problem in life-history theory, yet a simple first-principles target for that timing relative to lifespan has been missing. We propose that generation time is an optimal stopping time. Under the 1/e-law of best choice, the unique strategy that guarantees the highest minimum probability of selecting a superior option is to wait until a cumulative fraction 1/e of opportunities has passed. When reproductive opportunities arrive in an approximately time-homogeneous way over adult life, that threshold is 1/e (about 37%) of maximum lifespan. This fraction is confirmed by standard population dynamics for indeterminate growers, combining von Bertalanffy growth with constant mortality. A compilation of published reproductive schedules in plants, animals, and humans illustrates the predicted alignment across taxa and absolute timescales. The 1/e-law thus supplies an organizing quantitative account of a core life-history schedule.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2025

Inter-brain Synchronization in the Alpha Band during Minimal Tactile Interaction

Researchers have begun to examine the minimal conditions required for inter-brain coupling (IBC) in humans, and brain-to-brain synchrony can emerge during technology-mediated interactions, not only in shared physical spaces. Here, we present an exploratory electroencephalography (EEG) hyperscanning study investigating whether inter-brain synchronization (IBS) can emerge under conditions of both spatial isolation and minimal interaction. We used the Perceptual Crossing Experiment (PCE), a real-time task in which paired individuals search for one another in a one-dimensional virtual tactile environment using only minimal haptic cues. Dyad-shuffled surrogate analysis identified a small set of candidate inter-brain connections, with the strongest observed connections in the alpha bands. Unsupervised clustering identified four recurrent behavioral patterns and three inter-brain connectivity patterns. Descriptively, the two less common inter-brain configurations occurred more frequently during phases characterized by greater inter-avatar separation and reduced contact, although this association was not supported after accounting for the nested structure of the data. While preliminary, these findings provide a proof-of-concept framework for relating neural synchronization to interactive behavior in a highly constrained setting. The candidate connections were not individually significant, and whether inter-brain coupling arises under such conditions remains to be tested in hypothesis-driven designs.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Interpersonal alignment in infra-slow EEG rhythms anticipates mutual recognition

Across multiple timescales, neural rhythms play a crucial role in coordinating cognitive and physiological processes, with slower frequencies potentially relevant during social interaction. While electroencephalography (EEG) has been widely used to study such processes, examining these slower aspects during social interaction presents unique methodological challenges. Here we address this issue by investigating infra-slow EEG, respiratory, and electrodermal signals recorded simultaneously during a perceptual crossing experiment (PCE)--a recently established paradigm in social cognition and EEG hyperscanning. Through innovative spectral-characterization methods and a novel dyadic regression approach, we establish a methodological framework for examining infra-slow dynamics that coordinate brain and body during social interaction. Our analysis revealed that, when time-locked to task responses, the spectral power of infra-slow oscillations (ISOs) at 0.05 Hz and 0.1 Hz showed enhanced inter-participant similarity in dyads achieving mutual recognition relative to those that did not. Although not strictly simultaneous, this inter-personal alignment in the spectral power of ISOs was accompanied by concurrent dynamics both in respiratory pressure and electrodermal activity, suggesting that ISOs reflect the integration of autonomic, cognitive, and social processes, with their alignment facilitating shared understanding and joint action. Crucially, we find that task-responses in participants who successfully engaged in the PCE task were coupled to the phase of the 0.1 Hz rhythm. Additionally, we show that ISOs and aperiodic activity tracked behaviorally relevant transitions, notably prior to and during the perceptual crossing task. Taken together, our findings highlight an important role for ISOs in mediating the temporal dynamics of social cognition and show that inter-participant alignment in ISOs and physiological signals can serve as a proxy for the complex interplay between body physiology, cognition, and social behavior.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Single-cell phylogenomics identifies major groups of marine eugregarine parasites (Apicomplexa)

Gregarines are a large group of apicomplexan parasites that infect a wide range of invertebrate hosts, including diverse and speciose groups, such as annelids and arthropods. Marine eugregarines represent the majority of gregarine diversity, but remain poorly understood, especially their deepest phylogenetic relationships. To expand knowledge of marine eugregarine diversity and their evolutionary history, we surveyed marine invertebrates, with a particular focus on annelids, across multiple locations in British Columbia, Canada. From this effort, we obtained high-quality, single-cell transcriptomes from 20 different species of marine eugregarines, including nine previously described species and 11 novel ones, which more than doubles the amount of phylogenomic data for the group. These data, which comprehensively represent the known diversity of marine gregarines in annelid hosts, allowed us to construct an expanded phylogenetic tree based on small subunit ribosomal DNA sequences and a phylogenomic tree inferred from 142 proteins and 44,802 amino acid sequences. Our analyses identified five "superfamily-level" groups of marine eugregarines infecting annelid hosts: The Ancoroidea, Lecudinoidea, Loxomorphoidea n. superfam., Paralecudinoidea n. superfam., and Belladinoidea n. superfam., with the latter three newly established in this study. These findings contribute to ongoing efforts to build a robust molecular phylogenetic framework for gregarine diversity and refine gregarine classification, supporting the recognition of 11 eugregarine superfamilies. However, some of the deepest evolutionary relationships among these superfamilies remain unresolved, highlighting the need for expanded taxon sampling to better capture the true diversity of eugregarine parasites.

microbiology↗

bioRxiv2024

Football as foraging? Movements by individual players and whole teams exhibit Levy walk dynamics

Many organisms, ranging from modern humans to extinct species, exhibit movement patterns that can be described by Levy walk dynamics. It has been demonstrated that such behavior enables optimal foraging when resource distribution is sparse. Here, we analyze a dataset of football player trajectories, recorded during the matches of the Japanese football league to elucidate the presence of statistical signatures of Levy walks; such as the heavy-tailed distribution of distances traveled between significant turns and the characteristic superdiffusive behavior. We conjecture that the competitive environment of a football game leads to movement dynamics reminiscent of that observed in hunter-gathering populations and more broadly in any biological organisms foraging for resources, whose exact distribution is unknown to them. Apart from analyzing individual players movements, we investigate the dynamics of the whole team by studying the movements of its center of mass (teams centroid). Remarkably, the trajectory of the centroid also exhibits Levy walk properties, marking the first instance of such type of motion observed at the group level. Our work concludes with a comparative analysis of different teams and some discussion on the relevance of our findings to sports science and science more generally.

systems biology↗

bioRxiv2023

From autopoiesis to self-optimization: Toward an enactive model of biological regulation

The theory of autopoiesis has been influential in many areas of theoretical biology, especially in the fields of artificial life and origins of life. However, it has not managed to productively connect with mainstream biology, partly for theoretical reasons, but arguably mainly because deriving specific working hypotheses has been challenging. The theory has recently undergone significant conceptual development in the enactive approach to life and mind. Hidden complexity in the original conception of autopoiesis has been explicated in the service of other operationalizable concepts related to self-individuation: precariousness, adaptivity, and agency. Here we advance these developments by highlighting the interplay of these concepts with considerations from thermodynamics: reversibility, irreversibility, and path-dependence. We interpret this interplay in terms of the self-optimization model, and present modeling results that illustrate how these minimal conditions enable a system to re-organize itself such that it tends toward coordinated constraint satisfaction at the system level. Although the model is still very abstract, these results point in a direction where the enactive approach could productively connect with cell biology.

systems biology↗

bioRxiv2022

The thermodynamics of reproduction constrain species ranking dynamics and diversity

Iniguez, Pineda, Gershenson, and Barabasi proposed that complex systems can be simplified and analyzed in terms of the dynamics of ordered lists. For social, economic, and infrastructural systems, they succeeded in modeling the dynamics of ranking with two mechanisms, namely displacement (i.e., shuffling of ranks among existing elements) and replacement of elements by new elements. A general pattern is that, for open systems with influx and outflux of elements, e.g., a list with a subset of elements, only the top of the list is stable; for closed systems, top and bottom are stable. This model was fitted to empirical data, resulting in a universal curve in which displacement and replacement parameters are inversely related, which implies that a single parameter could regulate both. Our aim is twofold: First, we demonstrate that the pattern generalizes to ranking of biological species, based on FishBase records of fish taxonomy and life history traits. Second, we propose a candidate for a unified mechanism, based on a recent model of the thermodynamics of self-replication.

evolutionary biology↗