Dispersal abilities of riverine freshwater mussels influence metacommunity structure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary Historically, the importance of dispersal ability for the distribution of organisms has often been ignored, partly because of the difficulty of measuring it. Many unionid mussels, which have larvae that are obligate parasites (usually on fish), are endangered and the conservation and management of these mussels depend on knowledge of the main drivers of their distribution. Metacommunity theory predicts that limited dispersal should weaken the association of community composition with environmental factors. We tested this prediction by comparing the strength of association with environmental factors of (i) mussels with different dispersal abilities based on mobility of known host fish and (ii) mussels with different host infection strategies targeting fish with different mobility. Mussels with more mobile host fish showed a significantly stronger association with host fish presence and catchment (as a proximate measure for large‐scale differences in environmental conditions or as a spatial component) compared to mussels with less mobile host fish. Our results thus indicate that mussel distribution is more closely linked to host fish for high‐dispersal mussels, which suggests the potential for species sorting. Mussel species with weak dispersal capabilities show the opposite pattern and are therefore less able to colonise all suitable sites (species sorting with limited dispersal). Thus, the absence of mussels does not necessarily indicate unsuitable environmental conditions, but can also be caused by dispersal limitation. The impact of different host infection strategies was less clear, and differences in responses could be driven by differences in host fish or even habitat specialisation in addition to potential differences in dispersal abilities. A better knowledge of the dispersal via host fish of unionid mussels and their host infection strategies will be crucial to understanding their metacommunity dynamics, a necessary precursor for effective conservation practices.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 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 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".