Serendipitous discovery of a novel protostrongylid (Nematoda: Metastrongyloidea) in caribou, muskoxen, and moose from high latitudes of North America based on DNA sequence comparisons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fecal samples are often the only feasible means to assess diversity of parasites in wildlife; however, definitive identification of egg or larval stages in feces by morphology is rarely possible. We determined partial sequences from the second internal transcribed spacer region (ITS-2) of nuclear ribosomal DNA for first-stage, dorsal-spined larvae (DSL) in feces from caribou ( Rangifer tarandus tarandus (L., 1758), Rangifer tarandus caribou (Gmelin, 1788), Rangifer tarandus grantii (Allen, 1902)), muskoxen ( Ovibos moschatus moschatus (Zimmermann, 1780), Ovibos moschatus wardi Lydekker, 1900), moose ( Alces alces gigas Miller, 1899 and Alces alces andersoni Peterson, 1952), and from the tissue of one slug ( Deroceras laeve (Müller, 1774)) in Arctic–Subarctic North America. A previously uncharacterized, genetically distinct species was recognized based on sequences of 37 DSL from 19 ungulate hosts and the slug. Sequence similarity among individuals of this novel species was 91%–100%. For many individual DSL, paralogues of ITS-2 were detected. ITS-2 sequences from the novel species were 72%–77% similar to those of Varestrongylus alpenae (Dikmans, 1935) and 51%–61% similar to those of other protostrongylids known in North American and some Eurasian ungulates. Results indicate a discrete lineage of an undescribed protostrongylid infecting muskoxen, caribou, and moose from Alaska to Labrador. Sympatric infections with Parelaphostrongylus andersoni Prestwood, 1972 were found in three caribou herds.
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.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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 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".