Seasonal variation in foraging behaviour of plains zebra (<i>Equus</i> <i>quagga</i>) may alter contact with the anthrax bacterium (<i>Bacillus</i> <i>anthracis</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pathogens transmitted via the environment are often aggregated in space, and seasonal variation in wildlife foraging behaviour may alter contact rates with environmental pathogens. The soil-borne bacterium Bacillus anthracis Cohn, 1872 causes anthrax, and herbivores acquire gastrointestinal anthrax by ingesting spores. Therefore host foraging behaviour could be a fundamental component of anthrax epidemiology. This study investigated seasonal changes in bite density and diet of plains zebras (Equus quagga Boddaert, 1785) in relation to anthrax seasonality in Etosha National Park, Namibia, where most zebra anthrax cases are observed in wet seasons. The diet of zebras shifted from more short grasses during the wet season to more tall grasses in the dry season, suggesting a greater potential for soil ingestion in wet seasons. Zebras also foraged most intensively in the wet season with the number of bites/step declining through the dry season. This higher bite density in wet seasons may lead individuals to ingest greater concentrations of the pathogen if foraging in a localized infectious area. Although sex and reproductive state affected bite density, no sex difference in anthrax occurrence was observed. This study demonstrates how considering variation in host foraging behaviour may enhance our understanding of disease seasonality for pathogens with foraging-dependent transmission.
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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) | 0.000 | 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 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".