To safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of the publisher and article authors, this Agreement is formulated in accordance with the Open Access Policy (Version 2025.12.01) of the Journal of Tropical Biology. The article author (hereinafter referred to as the "Author") voluntarily transfers relevant rights of the article to the Editorial Office of the Journal of Tropical Biology (hereinafter referred to as the "Editorial Office"), and both parties agree as follows:

I. Copyright Transfer

    The Author voluntarily transfers to the Editorial Office, on a permanent basis, all property rights of the article, including but not limited to the compilation right, distribution right, reproduction right, translation right, and information network dissemination right. This includes the right to authorize inclusion in domestic and international literature retrieval systems and databases, publication and dissemination in any medium or language (subject to compliance with Chinese laws and regulations), and submission to institutions such as the National Library for archival purposes. The Author retains moral rights such as the right of attribution and the right to protect the integrity of the work, as well as other rights stipulated in this Agreement.

II. Open Access Declaration (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

    As the copyright owner, the Editorial Office publishes the article under the Gold Open Access model and authorizes public use in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

    This license permits any user to:

    Reproduce and Distribute: reproduce and distribute the work in any medium and in any form;

    Public Communication: publicly display, broadcast, perform, or disseminate the work via the internet.

    However, the following conditions must be observed:

    Attribution (BY): Appropriate attribution must be provided, including a link to this license and an indication of whether modifications have been made to the original work. Attribution may be made in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses the user's use;

    NonCommercial (NC): The work may not be used for commercial purposes;

    NoDerivatives (ND): The original work may not be modified, transformed, or used to create derivative works;

    No Additional Restrictions: Legal terms or technical measures may not be applied to restrict others from doing anything permitted by the license.

    This authorization is global, royalty-free, irrevocable, and valid until the expiration of the copyright protection period.

III. Special Authorization Clauses

    As the copyright owner, the Editorial Office authorizes public use through the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Meanwhile, the Editorial Office specially authorizes the Author to exercise rights within the following scope to ensure flexibility in academic activities (this authorization does not apply to third parties):

· Institutional Archiving: The final version of the article may be deposited in institutional repositories of non-commercial funding agencies or the author's affiliated institution, such as the National Library of China, the Basic Research Knowledge Repository of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Open Research Repository, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institutional Repository;

· Academic Research: The author may cite, excerpt, or extend the results of this article in research projects they lead, or conduct new research based on the methodology herein. If derivative results involve patent applications or technology transfer (intellectual property rights of derivative results belong to the author or affiliated institution), the core content of this article (such as data, methodology, conclusions, etc.) may not be directly reproduced; only viewpoints may be cited with proper attribution;

· Personal Sharing: The article may be shared on personal homepages and non-commercial academic online platforms (such as ResearchGate academic profiles, institutional repositories, etc.), but may not be uploaded to commercial content platforms (such as Baidu Wenku, etc.);

· Subsequent Use: Content from this article may be cited or excerpted in subsequently published academic works or articles, or lecture materials may be compiled for classroom teaching purposes, provided that the core viewpoints, data, or conclusions are not adapted, and no separate permission is required (but the original source must be acknowledged in the publication);

    Special Note: The above authorization is limited to the Author personally and may not be sub-licensed to third parties. When exercising the above rights, the Author must prominently indicate that the original article was published in the Journal of Tropical Biology. Third-party use must strictly comply with the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, and the Author has no authority to grant rights exceeding the CC license to third parties on behalf of the Editorial Office.