Temporal dynamics of helminth infections in eastern grey kangaroos (Macropus giganteus) in Victoria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parasite infection is increasingly recognised as a factor shaping the population dynamics, life history and behaviour of hosts. However, before the impacts of parasites on wildlife hosts can be investigated, seasonal patterns in host exposure to parasitic agents must be determined. We examined infection patterns at three sites in Victoria, and combined field experiments and observations to construct a generalised life cycle of the helminth community in eastern grey kangaroos (Macropus giganteus). Kangaroo populations in Victoria had very similar helminth communities, with 20–25 species detected at each site. Despite examining relatively few hosts in this study, at least 87% of all gastrointestinal helminths were recovered according to bootstrap estimates. The prepatent period of infection in eastern grey kangaroo nematodes was at least 3 months, and faecal egg output showed a distinct seasonal pattern, with a peak in egg counts from October through to January each year. Data from one site indicated that faecal egg counts were influenced predominantly by the abundance of a single nematode species (Pharyngostrongylus kappa), despite adults accounting for only 7% of the total nematode burden. This highlights the problems associated with using faecal egg counts to estimate nematode burdens in this host. Contamination of pasture plots showed that nematode eggs take ~14 days to larvate once deposited, and that autumn rains likely triggered emergence from faecal pellets. The abundance of infective larvae in the environment therefore appears to be closely tied to environmental conditions, with a peak in infection of hosts in the winter months.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".