Competitive effects of the forest tent caterpillar on the gallers and leaf-miners of trembling aspen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
:Interspecific competition has been identified as a major structuring force in phytophagous arthropod communities. We would expect to find particularly strong competitive effects in communities with outbreaking components, where the joint food resource is depleted by a single super-abundant species. To assess how arthropod assemblages of the trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides, Salicaceae) respond to outbreaks by the forest tent caterpillar (Malacosoma disstria, Lepidoptera: Lasiocampidae), we sampled galls and leaf-mines in central Alberta, western Canada. Both the incidence and rank order of sympatric taxa varied with the abundance of M. disstria.While most species were “susceptible” to defoliation by M. disstria, declining in abundance with increasing densities of forest tent caterpillars, two species showed no response and one “resistant” species even increased. These patterns at the landscape scale appear to reflect competitive mechanisms acting at a local scale. In a laboratory choice experiment, M. disstria larvae were found to damage a higher proportion of “susceptible” galls than “resistant” galls. Patterns at the landscape scale were also indicative of large-scale movement of gallers and leaf-miners. Following a year of severe defoliation, population densities within an outbreak area declined with increasing distance from the outbreak edge. This finding identifies regional processes as important in the population dynamics of the target taxa. Our study suggests a major structuring role for M. disstria in local arthropod communities. As outbreaks regularly affect a large proportion of temperate forests, they create ample opportunity for competitive interactions among phytophagous arthropods.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".