EDITORIAL—A REVIVED FOCUS ON THE PRAYING MANTISES (INSECTA: MANTODEA)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With approximately 2400 described species distributed worldwide (Ehrmann, 2002), praying mantises (Mantodea) exhibit extensive variation in morphological adaptations and life history strategies, typically in connection to their strict predatory habits. Praying mantis diversity is frequently under-appreciated, mostly because of their sedentary and highly cryptic lifestyle, often resorting to various forms of mimicry and mimesis, resembling sticks, flowers, tree bark, bird droppings, pebbles, moss, lichen, and green and dead leafs. Because of these attributes, they are difficult to collect and observe in the field. Certain aspects of praying mantis ecology, behavior and physiology have historically received more attention than others, though most studies focus on a handful of species from temperate regions (see Prete et al., 1999). In contrast, tropical regions (which hold the bulk of Mantodea biodiversity) have received limited attention by researchers, that attention often punctuated. Their apparent lack of economic importance, rarity in collections and the ongoing “taxonomic impediment”, have all conspired to impede taxonomic and evolutionary studies. The consequences of these deficiencies are far reaching. For example, the current dearth of detailed taxonomic treatments and identification keys prevent the accurate assessment of regional faunas (Rivera, 2010). Further, the lack of a solid taxonomic foundation precludes the formal documentation of relevant aspects of natural history, a discipline that has also faced a steady decline since the early 20th Century (Hampton & Wheeler, 2012), but nonetheless is fundamental for fostering scientific inquiry and hypotheses formulation. The diversity of ecological strategies and adaptations of mantises, their role as predators, and their well-known (but little understood) cannibalistic sexual behaviors, make of these charismatic insects also outstanding model organisms to explore broader questions in ecology and evolutionary biology.
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.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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 it