Mechanical properties of the cuticle of the tick,<i>Amblyomma hebraeum</i>(Acari: Ixodidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Female ticks of the family Ixodidae increase their mass up to 100-fold during the 7-10 day feeding period. We determined the material properties of the alloscutal cuticle of female Amblyomma hebraeum from the time of moulting through to full engorgement. The material properties of the cuticle were evaluated by a Kelvin-Voigt analysis of compliance determined from the stretch of loops of cuticle under stress. There was a 3-fold increase in cuticle dry mass during the first 3 weeks post-moult, during which the ductility and stiffness of the cuticle increased substantially. Under stress, the cuticle displayed time-dependent stretch, with a plastic (non-recoverable) and viscoelastic (recoverable) component. Plastic deformation was reasonably constant in the range 10-15% over a wide range of induced stress above ∼ 0.6 MPa. The plastic component of tick alloscutal cuticle was about 5-10 times higher than that of unsclerotized insect cuticle. Tick cuticle is far more ductile than unsclerotized insect cuticle. Material properties of the cuticle did not change significantly as a function of cuticular water content over the normal range throughout the feeding cycle (13-37% wet mass). Injected dopamine (DA) reduced one measure of the viscosity of the cuticle by 38%. Plastic deformability of the cuticle was reduced by 70% after an in vitro stretch, but restored in fully engorged ticks, and in in vitro stretched loops by treatment with DA and reduced pH. Thinning of the cuticle by half during the rapid phase of engorgement requires plastic deformation (irreversible strain) in two orthogonal dimensions in excess of 40%. Treatment with DA increased plastic deformation and enabled extensibility (strain at the point of rupture) above 40%.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".