ASSESSMENT OF HEALTH AND GROWTH OF RING-NECKED PHEASANTS FOLLOWING CONSUMPTION OF INFECTED INSECTS OR CONIDIA OF ENTOMOPATHOGENIC FUNGI, Metarhizium anisopliae var. acridum AND Beauveria bassiana , FROM MADAGASCAR AND NORTH AMERICA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Isolates of two fungi (Beauveria bassiana and Metarhizium anisopliae var. acridum) from Madagascar are being developed for control of grasshoppers and locusts, as part of a search for alternatives to environmentally detrimental chemical insecticides. The probable effects of these entomopathogens on nontarget species must be determined before operational use. Birds may become exposed to these fungi either directly, by consuming spores deposited on their food items, or secondarily, by consuming grasshoppers or locusts that have died from infection by these biocontrol agents. This article presents the results of per os challenge from fungus-infected food items. Male and female ring-necked pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) were exposed at 4 d of age and again at 9 d of age to challenge treatments, or 2 control treatments (18 male and 18 female birds per treatment group). Pheasants were weighed at 9, 17, and 25 d of age, tarsal length was measured at 25 d of age, and they were observed daily for signs of adverse effects of the experimental treatments. At the time of euthanasia (25 d of age), 2 or 3 randomly selected birds from each of the groups exposed to infected grasshoppers, plus the 2 control groups, underwent complete necropsies and histopathological examination of 16 tissues from each bird. Results show that in both sexes, weight gain at both 17 and 25 d was not significantly different between challenge groups and control groups. Tarsal length at 25 d of age, an indication of structural growth, was also not markedly different among challenged and control groups. Histopathological changes were generally undetectable, mild, or moderate, and not consistently associated with any treatment. Based on these findings, there is little indication that birds are susceptible to detrimental health effects from direct or secondary exposure to the two entomopathogenic fungi studied.
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) | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".