Comparison of male reproductive success in malaria-refractory and susceptible strains of Anopheles gambiae
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: In female mosquitoes that transmit malaria, the benefits of being refractory to the Plasmodium parasite are balanced by the immunity costs in the absence of infection. Male mosquitoes, however, gain no advantage from being refractory to blood-transmitted parasites, so that any costs associated with an enhanced immune system in the males limit the evolution of female refractoriness and has practical implications for the release of transgenic males. METHODS: Aspects of the male cost of carrying Plasmodium-refractory genes were estimated by comparing the males' immune response and reproductive success among strains of Anopheles gambiae that had been selected for refractoriness or extreme susceptibility to the rodent malaria parasite, Plasmodium yoelii nigeriensis. The refractory males had a stronger melanization response than males from the susceptible line. Four traits were used as correlates of a male's reproductive success: the proportion of females that were inseminated by a fixed number of males in a cage within a fixed time frame, the proportion of females with motile sperm in their spermathecae, the proportion of ovipositing females, and the mean number of eggs per batch. RESULTS: Although there were significant differences among groups of males in sperm motility and oviposition success, these differences in male reproductive success were not associated with the refractory or susceptible male genotypes. Contrary to expectation, females mated to early emerging refractory males laid significantly more eggs per batch than females mated to later emerging susceptible males. Sperm motility and oviposition success were strongly correlated suggesting that variation in sperm motility influences female oviposition and ultimately male reproductive success. CONCLUSION: An increased melanization response in male A. gambiae does not diminish male reproductive success under the experimental protocol used in this study. That refractory males induced ovipositing females to lay more eggs than susceptible males is an interesting result for any strategy considering the release of transgenic males. That sperm motility influences female oviposition is also important for the release of transgenic males.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".