Geographic biotype and host-associated local adaptation in a polyphagous species, <I>Lambdina fiscellaria</I> (Lepidoptera: Geometridae) feeding on balsam fir on Anticosti Island, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The debate about mechanisms underlying the evolution of host specialization by herbivorous insects remains open. Natural selection may act locally and lead to different patterns of geographic variation in life history traits of polyphagous herbivores. The hypothesis of genetically-based trade-offs in offspring performance on different hosts has been proposed but this has rarely been demonstrated. Under laboratory conditions, the biological performance of two populations of the hemlock looper Lambdina fiscellaria (Guenée), a highly polyphagous lepidopteran, was compared when reared on three different tree host species: balsam fir, eastern hemlock and sugar maple. One population originated from Anticosti Island, Québec, Canada, where the insect has evolved without having access to two of the three tree species tested, the other being from the mainland where all tree species are present. When reared on balsam fir foliage, which was naturally available to each population, larvae from Anticosti Island underwent four instars compared with five for the mainland population, indicating the existence of geographic biotypes in L. fiscellaria. When reared on the foliage of non-naturally available host trees, larvae from Anticosti Island had a higher incidence of supernumerary instars. This is a unique example where local adaptation to environmental conditions of an insect herbivore is expressed through a differential number of larval instars. Moreover, the Anticosti Island population showed a higher growth related index on the host available to both populations indicating that a fitness trade-off was the evolutionary process underlying the local adaptation of this population on balsam fir.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".