Risk of Infection by the Fungal Pathogen<i>Entomophaga maimaiga</i>Among Lepidoptera on the Forest Floor
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The entomopathogenic fungus Entomophaga maimaiga causes epizootics in gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar (L.), populations and persists in forests as a reservoir of spores in soil at the bases of trees. To investigate whether E. maimaiga infects Lepidoptera living in leaf litter, we collected and reared larvae in leaf litter, understory vegetation, and on tree boles within a 200-cm radius around trunks of red oak, Quercus rubra L., trees. Among the 358 lepidopteran larvae reared, only one gelechiid larva (out of 84 collected) and one larva of the noctuid Sunira bicolorago (out of 20 individuals from this species) were infected by E. maimaiga. Our collections included 67 gypsy moth larvae, of which 25 (37%) were infected by E. maimaiga. The majority of infected gypsy moth larvae were collected during the second half of June, when few nontarget Lepidoptera were present in the oak leaf litter. A bioassay of Zanclognatha laevigata Grote, a herminiine noctuid whose larvae spend their entire lives in leaf litter, yielded no infection. Because laboratory host specificity studies had demonstrated high levels of infection only in lymantriid larvae, we also caged larvae of the lymantriid Orgyia leucostigma (J. E. Smith) over soil at the bases of trees or in understory vegetation. Levels of infection for O. leucostigma remained consistently lower than among caged gypsy moth larvae, and infection was always higher in the soil than on the understory vegetation. We conclude that, aside from gypsy moth larvae, E. maimaiga infections among litter-dwelling lepidopteran larvae were rare, and we hypothesize that infection of other lymantriids in the field will depend on whether they visit the ground level for a significant period of time.
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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) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
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 it