Is there a cost of parasites to caribou?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
SUMMARY: Macroparasites potentially play a significant but often ignored role in the ecology and dynamics of wild ruminant populations. In the Arctic, parasites may impact on host populations by exacerbating the effects of seasonal and limited forage availability on the condition, fecundity and survival of individuals. We studied the effects of abomasal nematode parasites and warble flies, Hypoderma tarandi, on condition and pregnancy of caribou Rangifer tarandus in the Dolphin-Union herd, Nunavut, Canada. By the end of winter, female caribou over 2 years old showed a significant decrease in body weight with increasing nematode burden, and a decrease in back fat depth with increasing warble abundance. These effects were exaggerated in the non-pregnant fraction of the population. High warble larvae burdens were also associated with significantly reduced probability of being pregnant. Our research demonstrates a negative relationship between parasites and caribou condition that may have consequences for their fitness. Additionally, we discuss the possibility that muskox Ovibos moschatus share some parasite species with the caribou and could lead to elevated burdens in the sympatric host. Parasites may have been a contributory factor in a previous winter range-shift of the caribou herd and this may reflect a form of apparent competition between the two ungulate species.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".