Biology of House Finch feather mites,<i>Proctophyllodes pinnatus</i>(Acari: Proctophyllodidae), parallels variation in preen gland secretions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Except for Dubinin's classic works in the 1950s, there is very little information on the natural history or population dynamics of feather mites (Astigmata: Acariformes, Pterolichoidea). We studied variation in numbers of the different life stages of the feather mite Proctophyllodes pinnatus (Nitzsch) (Analgoidea: Proctophyllodidae) on captive House Finches Carpodacus mexicanus (Müller) (Passeriformes: Fringillidae) from December 2003 to November 2004. Simultaneously, we also studied how preen gland secretion varied in those birds. We monitored 20 House Finches (10 individuals of each sex) for the presence of mites on their wing feathers. There was seasonal variation in the abundance and prevalence of mites on different individual birds. Most birds did not show any mites from December to April. Mite numbers started to increase in July and peaked in August–September. In September, we observed more mites of early stages than in any other months. We also observed higher proportions of adults in August and October and fewer adults than expected in September, suggesting that more than one generation was involved. By November, very few mites were present on the wing feathers. The variation in mite numbers paralleled variation in the composition and quantity of preen gland secretions produced by the host House Finches. In most of the captive birds, secretion peaked in the month following peak mite-abundance. During the period when mite abundance was highest, secretions contained a higher diversity of chemicals. Prevalence of mites on wild House Finches showed similar trends to those observed in captive birds. Relative abundances of life stages on wild birds collected in July were similar to those observed for captive House Finches in the same month.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".