Population Biology of Cytoplasmic Incompatibility: Maintenance and Spread of Cardinium Symbionts in a Parasitic Wasp
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bacteria that cause cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI) are perhaps the most widespread parasites of arthropods. CI symbionts cause reproductive failure when infected males mate with females that are either uninfected or infected with a different, incompatible strain. Until recently, CI was known to be caused only by the alpha-proteobacterium Wolbachia. Here we present the first study of the population biology of Cardinium, a recently discovered symbiont in the Bacteroidetes that causes CI in the parasitic wasp Encarsia pergandiella (Hymenoptera: Aphelinidae). Cardinium occurs at high frequency ( approximately 92%) in the field. Using wasps that were recently collected in the field, we measured parameters that are crucial for understanding how CI spreads and is maintained in its host. CI Cardinium exhibits near-perfect rates of maternal transmission, causes a strong reduction in viable offspring in incompatible crosses, and induces a high fecundity cost, with infected females producing 18% fewer offspring in the first 4 days of reproduction. We found no evidence for paternal transmission or horizontal transmission of CI Cardinium through parasitism of an infected conspecific. No evidence for cryptic parthenogenesis in infected females was found, nor was sex allocation influenced by infection. We incorporated our laboratory estimates into a model of CI dynamics. The model predicts a high stable equilibrium, similar to what we observed in the field. Interestingly, our model also predicts a high threshold frequency of CI invasion (20% for males and 24% for females), below which the infection is expected to be lost. We consider how this threshold may be overcome, focusing in particular on the sensitivity of CI models to fecundity costs. Overall our results suggest that the factors governing the dynamics of CI Wolbachia and Cardinium are strikingly similar.
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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) | 0.000 | 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 it