First detection of Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato DNA in king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus halli)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The hard tick Ixodes uriae parasitises a wide range of seabird species in the circumpolar areas of both Northern and Southern hemispheres and has been shown to be infected with Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato, the bacterial agents of Lyme borreliosis. Although it is assumed that seabirds represent viable reservoir hosts, direct demonstrations of infection are limited to a single study from the Northern hemisphere. Here, the blood of 50 tick-infested adult king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus halli) breeding in the Crozet Archipelago (Southern Indian Ocean) was examined for B. burgdorferi sl exposure by serology and for spirochetemia by in vitro DNA amplification. Four birds were found positive by serology, whereas B. burgdorferi sl DNA was detected in two other birds. Our data therefore provide the first direct proof of Borrelia burgdorferi sl spirochetes in seabirds of the Southern hemisphere and indicate a possible reservoir role for king penguins in the natural maintenance of this bacterium. Although the bacterial genetic diversity present in these hosts and the infectious period for tick vectors remain to be elucidated, our results add to a growing body of knowledge on the contribution of seabirds to the complex epizootiology of Lyme disease and the global dissemination of B. burgdorferi sl spirochetes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".