An aphid lineage maintains a bark‐feeding niche while switching to and diversifying on conifers
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lachnine aphids are unusual among phytophagous insects because they feed on both leafy and woody parts of both angiosperm and conifer hosts. Despite being piercing-sucking phloem-feeders, these aphids are most speciose on woody parts of coniferous hosts. To evaluate the significance of this unusual biology on their evolution, we reconstructed the ancestral host and feeding site of the lachnine aphids and estimated important host shifts during their evolution. We sampled 78 species representing 14 of the 18 genera of Lachninae from Asia and North America. We performed parsimony, Bayesian and likelihood phylogenetic analyses of combined mitochondrial Cox1, Cox2, CytB and nuclear EF1a1 DNA sequences. We dated the resulting phylogram's important nodes using Bayesian methods and multiple fossil and secondary calibrations. Finally, we used parsimony and Bayesian ancestral state reconstruction to evaluate ancestral feeding ecology. Our results suggest the lachnine common ancestor fed on a woody part of an angiosperm host in the mid-Cretaceous. A shift to conifer hosts in the Late Cretaceous is correlated with a subsequent increased diversification in the Palaeogene, but a switch to leafy host tissues did not engender a similar burst of diversification. Extant lachnine lineages exhibit the full range of historical association with their hosts: some appeared before, some concomitant with and some after the appearance of their hosts. We conclude our study by placing all the lachnine genera in five tribes.
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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) | 0.000 | 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 it