The trophic position of planktonic ciliate populations in the food webs of some East African lakes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The trophic role of planktonic ciliates was investigated in the food webs of 17 East African lakes of different salinity and trophy. Experiments with 1μm latex beads showed that Cyclidium, Halteria, Dysteria, Aspidisca and Vorticella are bacterivores. Examination of food vacuole contents showed that the ciliate communities also included herbivores, carnivores, omnivores and mixotrophs. While some herbivorous ciliates grazed picoplanktonic algae or flagellates, large omnivores such as Frontonia and Linostoma ingested cyanobacterial filaments or preyed on other ciliates. Most predaceous ciliates were haptorids, and consumed other ciliates or metazoa. Growth rate estimates for planktonic ciliate populations in East African lakes ranged from 0.18 to 6.56d−1. From these growth rates and biomass, the estimated production of ciliate populations ranged from 5.9 to 2 335μg carbon l−1 d−1 and increased with lake trophic status and water electrical conductivity. Bacterivores, herbivores, carnivores and mixotrophs accounted for 36%, 39%, 21% and 4% of total production, respectively, over all the lakes. Zooplankton were the probable consumers of much of this ciliate production, although some taxa were consumed mostly within the microzooplankton community, presumably by other ciliates.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".