A novel association between a beetle and a snake: Parasitism of<i>Elaphe obsoleta</i>by<i>Nicrophorus pustulatus</i>
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
While studying the nesting ecology of black rat snakes (Elaphe obsoleta [Say]; Serpentes: Colubridae) in eastern Ontario, we discovered that their eggs regularly contained larvae of the burying beetle Nicrophorus pustulatus (Herschel) (Coleoptera: Silphidae). The beetle appears to be a parasitoid of the snakes, which may make this the first documented case in which a vertebrate is the host of a parasitoid. Up to 100% of snake eggs in a nest were destroyed by beetles, indicating that N. pustulatus may be a significant, and heretofore unrecognized source of egg mortality for oviparous snakes. Evidence suggests that the association between these two species is well established, and that the beetle may also attack other species of oviparous snakes. Identification of snake eggs as the substrate for reproduction by N. pustulatus solves the mystery of where this species breeds. Also, the large amount of available biomass in communal black rat snake nests may explain why N. pustulatus is so fecund relative to its congeners.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it