Larval Morphology of Meruidae (Coleoptera: Adephaga) and Its Phylogenetic Implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Meruidae, or comb-clawed cascade beetles, are a recently discovered monotypic family of Adephaga endemic to Venezuela. The larvae of Meruidae are described for the first time, based on material of Meru phyllisaeSpangler & Steiner, 2005, collected together with adults in southern Venezuela. External morphological features, including chaetotaxy, are reported for the mature larva and an assessment made of the polarity of larval characters of phylogenetic utility in Adephaga. Larvae of Meruidae possess a mixture of primitive and derived character states, and they are unique within the Adephaga in that here the mandibles are asymmetrical, the respiratory system is comprised of only two pairs of spiracles (= oligopneustic), the claws are pectinate, and the abdominal sternite VIII is prolonged overlapping the abdominal sternite IX. A parsimony analysis based on 18 informative larval characteristics was conducted with the program PAUP*. The most parsimonious trees confirm Meruidae as a relatively basal lineage within the Dytiscoidea. Both Meru Spangler & Steiner and Noteridae are hypothesized to have diverged anterior to Amphizoidae, Aspidytidae, Hygrobiidae, and Dytiscidae.
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 | 0.001 | 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".