No support for fluctuating asymmetry as a biomarker of chemical residues in livestock dung
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Fluctuating asymmetries (FAs) are small random deviations between left- and right-side measurements of normally symmetrical traits in a given organism. Changes in FA have frequently been proposed as biomarkers for organisms exposed to stress during development and may have value for detecting low levels of chemical residues or other stressors in the environment. We tested this hypothesis in three replicated laboratory experiments and failed to find any effect of chemical residues (ivermectin) in cattle dung on levels of FAs (wing and leg traits) for the dung-breeding fly Scathophaga stercoraria L. (Diptera: Scathophagidae). In trying to resolve this discrepancy with previous reports, we found that many studies failed to replicate measurements of FA traits within an experiment, which increases the likelihood of spurious positive results. Furthermore, experiments were rarely replicated either within or between studies, so the repeatability of positive results has usually gone untested. These issues have been raised by others, but are still not being adequately addressed. Discussions regarding the value of FAs as biomarkers will not advance until this is done.
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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 | 0.005 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".