Population Collapses in a Forecasted Outbreak of<i>Lambdina fiscellaria</i>(Lepidoptera: Geometridae) Caused by Spring Egg Parasitism by<i>Telenomus</i>spp. (Hymenoptera: Scelionidae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A major outbreak of the hemlock looper, Lambdina fiscellaria (Guenée), predicted for 1997 on the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec, collapsed due to egg parasitism by Telenomus spp. Only 3,857 ha of balsam–spruce forest were defoliated from the forecasted 130,000-ha outbreak area. This represents only 3% of the anticipated outbreak area. We present data that indicate highly efficient natural control by Telenomus spp. The L. fiscellaria population also collapsed due to egg parasitism by Telenomus spp. on Anticosti Island in the same year. In the past, L. fiscellaria egg parasitism has usually been estimated from egg samples collected in the fall or early spring surveys and was based mostly on the eggs’ black coloration. However, our observations indicate that entirely black and opaque eggs result from parasitism by Trichogramma spp., those attacked by Telenomus spp. varying from translucent to dark brown but always showing a single dark spot on the chorion. Moreover, our data on seasonal egg parasitism showed important and rapid increases in parasitism by Telenomus spp. in late spring. Therefore, similar unexplained L. fiscellaria outbreak collapses that occurred in the past might have also been caused by egg parasitism by Telenomus spp. There are several species in the Telenomus complex attacking L. fiscellaria and the most abundant one might be a “keystone species” in the population dynamics of this defoliator. The spring activity of Telenomus spp. may lead to errors when forecasting L. fiscellaria populations based only on fall egg surveys.
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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 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".