Reduced food consumption in the grasshopper <i>Melanoplus sanguinipes</i> (Orthoptera: Acrididae) parasitized by <i>Blaesoxipha atlanis</i> (Diptera: Sarcophagidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Blaesoxipha atlanis (Aldrich) is a common parasite of Melanoplus sanguinipes (Fabr.) in western Canada. We tested the hypothesis that parasitism by B. atlanis reduces food consumption by adult M. sanguinipes . Unparasitized grasshoppers serving as controls and grasshoppers infected with a single parasite larva were fed known quantities of freshly cut wheat ( Triticum aestivum L. ‘Katepwa’) (Poaceae) leaves in the laboratory. The median development time in hosts of larvae of both male and female B. atlanis was 5.5 days. Two thirds of parasitized grasshoppers died within 9 days of infection, but all control insects survived. The dry mass of leaves consumed each day did not differ between parasitized insects that died and insects that survived parasitism; both groups fed less than unparasitized controls. The influence of parasitism on food consumption differed between host sexes, with feeding being depressed earlier and more severely in female than in male grasshoppers. The reduction in food consumption was most pronounced on day 6 after infection, when parasitized males and females consumed only 10% and 7%, respectively, of the food consumed by unparasitized controls. Parasite sex did not influence food consumption. Grasshoppers that survived parasitism by B. atlanis resumed feeding, consuming as much as unparasitized counterparts. Reduced food consumption limited the ability of grasshoppers to compensate for the nutritional demands of developing parasite larvae. As a consequence, parasitized grasshoppers lost body mass during the interaction. We propose that the temporary reduction in feeding by grasshoppers parasitized by B. atlanis that survive parasitism is not evidence of host regulation, but is consistent with a stress-induced alteration in host behaviour.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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 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".