Predatory fungi, wood decay, and the carbon cycle
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Predatory fungi attack nematodes and other microorganisms using a remarkable array of trapping devices to attract, capture, kill, and digest nematodes for food. The novelty of these relationships, however, has deflected attention from a more fundamental role played by these fungi in the ecosystem. The primary function of predatory fungi appears to be that of wood decay and hence they are cellulolytic or ligno-cellulolytic fungi_that attack other organisms as sources of nitrogen to supplement a primarily carbohydrate (woody) diet. The Carbon to Nitrogen ratio (C:N) of wood is extremely high and nitrogen is the limiting factor for growth of predatory fungi. Predation of nematodes or other organisms adds extra protein (nitrogen) to the system and reduces the C:N to manageable proportions. More importantly, nematode predation, although dramatic, is perhaps of less importance than the ability of wood decay fungi to attack bacteria and perhaps other life forms as nutrient supplements. By definition, therefore, many (most?) wood decay fungi are not saprobes (i.e. living on dead organic material) but are facultative parasites (saprobes that can also parasitize living organisms) for part of their life in which the predatory ‘parasitic’ phase runs parallel to the ‘saprophytic’ wood decay phase and both are essential to success. Based on their roles in building up woody material through mycorrhizal associations, and destroying it through biological decay, it is not surprising that the biomass of fungi in forest soils reaches 90% of the total and exceeds all other micro and meso-organisms combined. Based on the respiration of their massive amounts of hyphal material, fungi are the driving force in the biological component of the terrestrial carbon cycle.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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