Assessing chemical control of earthworms at airports
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Earthworms originating from Europe (e.g., Lumbricus spp., Aporrectodea spp.), which are common in the United States and southern Canada can create hazardous conditions at airports by attracting birds that pose a threat to aircraft. These nonnative earthworms are also considered pests on golf courses and sports fields, as well as having detrimental effects on temperate boreal forests. No toxicants or repellents are currently registered for earthworm control in the United States. Our purpose was to identify products that could be used to repel or suppress nonnative earthworms on airports or other managed sites where they pose a hazard or nuisance. We conducted experiments on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Plum Brook Station, Ohio, USA, and at an area about 15 km south of this site, during 2007–2013. We hypothesized that either abrasiveness or extreme low or high pH levels would be characteristic of an efficacious repellent. Ammonium sulfate fertilizer (an acidic treatment) repelled Lumbricus terrestris in choice tests. However, 6 applications of ammonium sulfate over 2 years only reduced the field density of Aporrectodea spp., and not Lumbricus spp. Application of tea‐seed cake pellets (TSP), a saponin‐rich byproduct of tea oil ( Camellia oleifera ) manufacture that causes earthworms to come to the surface and desiccate, temporarily reduced densities of both Lumbricus and Aporrectodea spp. in field plots. However, several applications per year would probably be needed for sustained control. Ring‐billed gulls ( Larus delawarensis ) showed no apparent adverse effects over a 48 hour period from feeding on TSP‐killed earthworms. We discuss potential value and limitations of TSP and other methods for managing earthworms to reduce airport bird‐strike hazards. © 2015 The Wildlife Society.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".