Host specificity and colonization by <i>Zachvatkinia caspica</i>, an analgoid feather mite of Caspian Terns
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relationships between feather mites and their avian hosts have great potential as subjects for studies of evolution and ecology. However, we must first achieve a better understanding of the ecological roles of feather mites (mutualistic versus parasitic) as well as their degree of host specificity before we can search for broad generalities at work in bird/feather-mite systems. I investigated host switching and feeding ecology in Zachvatkinia caspica, an analgoid feather mite that lives among the feathers of Caspian Terns (Sterna caspia). My approach involved imping (i.e., transplanting) mite-free feathers from California Gulls (Larus californicus) and Caspian Terns onto mite-infested Caspian Tern wings and quantifying the extent to which mites colonized the newly introduced feathers. This approach allowed me to expose the mites to both host and non-host feathers as well as to the presence or absence of preen oils collected from the two bird species. Mites "incubated" on tern wings showed no obvious avoidance of gull feathers or preen oil. This colonization of gull feathers suggests that some mite species have the potential to occupy a number of host species and that host switching in nature may be limited by infrequent opportunities to colonize nontraditional hosts.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".