Firebrats, <i>Thermobia domestica</i>, aggregate in response to the microbes <i>Enterobacter cloacae</i> and <i>Mycotypha microspora</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The firebrat, Thermobia domestica (Packard) (Thysanura: Lepismatidae), aggregates in response to the faeces of conspecifics as well as shelters previously inhabited by conspecifics. Our objective was to determine the source of the aggregation signal. Filter paper previously exposed to firebrats induced strong arrestment of firebrats. Polar solvents (water, methanol, acetonitrile) and less polar solvents (hexane, dichloromethane, ethyl ether), alone or in combination, failed to extract the aggregation signal from firebrat‐exposed paper. Moreover, solvent‐extracted paper continued to induce firebrat arrestment. In contrast, the aggregation signal could be obtained by physical extraction (freeze/thawing or ultrasonication) of firebrat‐exposed paper submerged in water. Five fungal species and four bacterial species were isolated from ultrasonicant solutions on potato dextrose‐, nutrient‐, and Glc NA c‐agar. Of the nine isolated microbes tested, only the fungus Mycotypha microspora Fenner (Mucorales) and the bacterium Enterobacter cloacae (Jordan) Hormaeche & Edwards (Enterobacteriaceae) induced arrestment of firebrats in bioassays. Our data support the conclusion that firebrats do not form aggregations in response to pheromones; instead, they aggregate in the presence of specific microbes or their metabolites.
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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 | 0.001 | 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".