Population structure, distribution patterns and precopulatory mate-guarding in the feather mite<i>Alloptes</i>Canestrini, 1879 (Acari: Analgoidea: Alloptidae) on auks (Charadriiformes: Alcidae) at the Gannet Islands, Labrador, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Feather mites are ubiquitous avian ectoparasites whose population structure is expected to vary with degree of coloniality and other aspects of host bird species' ecology. We investigated aggregation . and infrapopulation structure of feather mites of the genus Alloptes Canestrini on four auk species (with different levels of nesting aggregations) breeding at the Gannet Islands, Labrador, Canada. Feather mite populations were more prevalent and had higher relative abundance in Razorbills, Alca torda Linnaeus, and Atlantic Puffins, Fratercula arctica Linnaeus, compared to murres (Uria spp.). Prevalence increased moving from highly aggregated ledge-nesting hosts (53% in murres) to less aggregated, burrow-nesting hosts (87% in puffins), with similar trends in relative abundance. Prevalence and relative abundance of individual age-classes of feather mites varied among host species without any clear relationship to host coloniality. Infrapopulations were strongly female-biased (4–36% males), with a largeproportion of tritonymphs and adult females. Precopulatory mate guarding was observed in all sevencases of coupled individuals, each involving an adult male and a female tritonymph. This study constitutes the first record of precopulatory mate guarding in the genus Alloptes, a male strategy to ensure insemination of adult females as soon as they molt. Female-biased sex ratios may be produced in order to reduce local mate competition among male feather mites. Our study revealed several nonintuitive patterns of mite population structure, underlining the need for more detailed work on these ecologically important but poorly known species.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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".