Molecular evidence of cycad seed predation by immature Aulacoscelidinae (Coleoptera: Orsodacnidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adult beetles in the small subfamily Aulacoscelidinae (superfamily Chrysomeloidea) are known to feed on the foliage and juices of New World cycads (Order Cycadales; family Zamiaceae), but the habits of larvae have long remained a mystery. We provide the first direct evidence that Aulacoscelidinae larvae feed on and develop within the megagametophyte of the Mesoamerican cycad, Dioon merolae (Zamiaceae). Phylogenetic analyses based on partial DNA sequences from 3 genes recover a cycad seed‐feeding larva proposed to belong to Aulacoscelidinae. These observations reveal a more intimate feeding relationship between Aulacoscelidinae and their New World cycad host plants than was previously recognized. Further, adult Aulacoscelidinae have long been noted to resemble Jurassic fossil chrysomeloids in the extinct subfamily Protoscelidinae. The molecular, morphological, ecological and fossil data reported herein are broadly compatible with an early association between Aulacoscelidinae and their gymnosperm hosts.
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 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".