Amber‐colored excreta: a source of arrestment pheromone in firebrats, <i>Thermobia domestica</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Female, male, and juvenile firebrats, Thermobia domestica (Packard) (Thysanura: Lepismatidae), employ a pheromone that arrests conspecifics on contact. Paper shelters placed in a T. domestica colony accumulate fecal excreta (= frass) and other insect‐derived debris. Such shelters elicit arrestment by conspecifics. However, the definitive source of the arrestment pheromone was not known. We tested the hypothesis that one or more debris components from a T. domestica shelter constitute the source of the arrestment pheromone. In dual‐choice, still‐air olfactometer experiments, scales, exuviae, antennae, caudal filaments, gregarine parasite cysts, and silk (each intact or macerated) retrieved from shelters and separated for experiments, as well as saliva, hemolymph, and fat body extracted from insects all failed to arrest female T. domestica . Similarly, paper that had been fed upon by insects did not elicit an arrestment response, eliminating insect‐altered cellulose as the arrestant pheromone. In contrast, insect‐exposed glass significantly arrested females. Moreover, females were significantly arrested by (i) loose, insect‐derived debris brushed from shelters, (ii) a frass mixture manually separated from loose debris, and (iii) specific amber‐type frass manually separated from the frass mixture. These results lead us to conclude that amber‐type frass constitutes the source of at least part of the T. domestica arrestment pheromone.
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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) | 0.000 | 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 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".