
Ester PremateUniversity of Ljubljana · Department of Biology
Ester Premate
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Publications (27)
Cryptic species are an important part of freshwater biodiversity, yet it remains unclear how these species integrate into communities from local to regional geographic scales. To protect biodiversity, particularly overlooked cryptic species, an accurate understanding of the underlying processes and adequate level of protection is needed.
We analyse...
Understanding phenotype variation is among the central topics in biology. We revise and reanalyze studies of the amphipod genus Niphargus to confront two potential mechanisms driving its phenotype variation, namely, cladogenesis and adaptive evolution. We found evidence for both mechanisms. Reanalysis of a subset of traits using molecular phylogeny...
Sexual dimorphism can evolve in response to sex-specific selection pressures that vary across habitats. We studied sexual differences in subterranean amphipods Niphargus living in shallow subterranean habitats (close to the surface), cave streams (intermediate), and cave lakes (deepest, and most isolated). These three habitats differ because at gre...
Groundwater represents a vast, but mostly hidden and inaccessible ecosystem. Although often overlooked in freshwater research, groundwater organisms form a significant part of freshwater biodiversity, whereas their functions are crucial in different ecosystem processes. Knowledge on functional traits is generally lacking for most groundwater specie...
The upper Neretva River valley with river and tributaries, preserved forests, natural caves and buildings represents a very interesting area for bats. During two field expeditions in summer 2022, we collected data on bats using a variety of methods: inspecting the potential roosts, mist netting, and recording bat echolocation calls. We used manual...
The Dinarides in the Western Balkans host a globally exceptional subterranean biodiversity, but still areas remain with little or no data on subterranean species. In this work, we present the study of subterranean fauna in the upper Neretva River catchment (Eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina), which included the first systematic exploration of the inte...
The Eurasian beaver is a common rodent which became extinct in Slovenia in the 18th century and reappeared in the 1990’s. This field note describes an encounter with a beaver inside the Vidovec Cave (Metlika, Southeastern Slovenia). Apart from a sign of beaver presence, we also noticed a straw mat presumably used for sleeping. The described observa...
Biodiversity conservation across countries and ecosystems is traditionally based on a single species-or area-level attributes, such as endemicity or taxonomic diversity. Although alternative criteria integrating multiple biodiversity aspects on both species-and area-level have been proposed, they are only rarely considered in conservation planning,...
Climate change affects all ecosystems, but subterranean ecosystems are repeatedly neglected from political and public agendas. Cave habitats are home to unknown and endangered species, with low trait variability and intrinsic vulnerability to recover from human-induced disturbances. We studied the annual variability and cyclicity of temperatures in...
Water mites are a diverse but neglected meiofaunal group in interstitial habitats. In this study, water mites were sampled from the hyporheic zone of the upper Neretva river catchment in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In total, 10 obligate subterranean (hyporheobiontic) species were detected. Seven of them, i.e. Atractides pumilus (Szalay, 1946), Frontipo...
Aim: Morphologically cryptic species are an important part of global biodiversity, yet it remains unclear how these species contribute to and integrate into communities at different geographic scales. It is especially unclear at which scales they co-occur, and if and how their ranges overlap. To adequately protect biodiversity, an accurate understa...
Body size is one of the main characteristics of any organism and influences various aspects of individual's biology. In animal ecology, it represents a key functional trait that can be quantified using different measures and is often used as a proxy for different organismal functions. The way we quantify body size is critical in any study using thi...
Species performance depends on the concerted interplay of their functional traits. Natural selection acts on the performance of the species and influences entire suits of interdependent functional traits, thereby driving the evolution of functional diversity (FD) within a clade.
In a given habitat, interdependent functional traits are expected to i...
The Neretva Science Week was held in conjunction with the initiative “Save the Blue Heart of Europe” and the project “Scientists for Balkan Rivers”, which investigated the upper reaches of the Neretva River. The Neretva River and its surroundings are of great importance for bats due to the diversity of forest and underground ecosystems, canyon habi...
Range size is one of the most important criteria for determining species conservation status. It is an outcome of multiple factors, including a species' ecological tolerance and propensity to disperse, availability and temporal stability of suitable habitat patches, and between‐patch connectivity. Understanding the determinants of range size could...
The olm ( Proteus anguinus ), an endemic amphibian of the Dinarides’ underground waters (Europe), is one of the world’s most widely known subterranean species. Although various aspects of olm biology have been extensively studied, the data on their behavior in the wild remain scarce mostly due to inaccessibility of their natural habitat. Yet, olms...
Cave animals are biological models of fast evolutionary change induced by transition to extreme subterranean environments. But their concealed lifestyle makes it inherently difficult to study life-history changes. Therefore, currently very little is known on the reproduction of cave species, and even less is known on general patterns and potentiall...
Predator–prey interactions are among the most important biotic interactions shaping ecological communities and driving the evolution of defensive traits. These interactions and their effects on species received little attention in extreme and remote environments, where possibilities for direct observations and experimental manipulation of the anima...
Sex allocation theory predicts that the proportion of daughters to sons will evolve in response to ecological conditions that determine the costs and benefits of producing each sex. All else being equal, the adult sex ratio (ASR) should also vary with ecological conditions. Many studies of subterranean species reported female‐biased ASR, but no sys...
Identifying the relationships between morphology and trophic niche is at the core of functional morphology. Low resource diversity and fluxes of organic carbon are expected to constrain trophic specialisation of morphological structures because food resources are too scarce to promote trophic differentiation. However, species from low‐productivity...
Locomotion is an important, fitness-related functional trait. Environment selects for type of locomotion and shapes the morphology of locomotion-related traits such as body size and appendages. In subterranean aquatic arthropods, these traits are subjected to multiple, at times opposing selection pressures. Darkness selects for enhanced mechano- an...
Locomotion is a complex trait directly linked to different fitness components such as foraging, mate-finding, and escaping from predators. In a food-limited subterranean environment a strong selection for an energetically optimal strategy of locomotion is expected and should lead to different strategies among closely related species adapted to diff...