Temperature influences host instar selection in an aphid parasitoid: support for the relative fitness rule
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relative fitness rule states that parasitoid females should adopt risk-prone reproductive behaviours when expecting low reproductive success. Temperature influences the reproductive success of insects by affecting their basal metabolic rate during development, their egg load at emergence, and their life expectancy as adults. Using an aphid-parasitoid model system, we investigated the influence of developmental and adult temperature on the risk-sensitive decision-making of females. We considered the use of a low-quality host nymphal instar by the aphid parasitoid Aphidius ervi to be a risk-prone behaviour. Immature females were reared at 12, 20 or 28 C and had access to the four nymphal instars of the potato aphid Macrosiphum euphorbiae for oviposition at one of these temperatures. Host selection behaviour was continuously recorded during exploitation of an aphid patch. We observed that warm-developed females and parasitoids foraging at high temperature attacked low-quality hosts more frequently than females from other treatments. These results support the hypothesis that a decrease in expected parasitoid reproductive success resulted in risk-prone behaviours. To our knowledge, this is the first experimental evidence suggesting that temperature influences host stage selection and risk-sensitive making decision in parasitoids, and the present study is the first to support the relative fitness rule.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".