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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".