Parasite virulence and host resistance in a slave-making ant community
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Questions: Does virulence of socially parasitic slave-making ants vary in interactions with different host species? If so, can this be linked to host properties such as nest availability or resistance of host species? Study system: Our study system included three slave-making ant species, Polyergus breviceps, Formica puberula, and F. gynocrates, and two host species, F. occulta and F. sp. cf. argentea. Methods: We measured slave-maker virulence by comparing the mortality rates of host nests that were raided by slave-makers to host nests that were not raided. To determine whether slave-makers that were more likely to over-exploit slave resources were more prudent (lower virulence), we compared the percentage of nests that were raided for each host species. To determine whether variation in slave-maker virulence was due to different levels of host resistance, we compared the aggressiveness of the two host species towards slave-makers during slave raids, reasoning that nests of a more aggressive host species would show higher survivorship. Results: Slave-makers were highly virulent in association with the host, F. sp. cf. argentea, but more benign in interactions with F. occulta. Formica occulta was not universally more aggressive against slave-makers than F. sp. cf. argentea, suggesting that this alone is not a sufficient explanation for the higher survivorship of this species. Slave-makers that specialized on F. occulta were at higher risk of over-exploiting resources, indicating that more prudent slave-maker strategies might be selected for in interactions with this host.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".