Systematics and natural history of the millipede-parasitic genus<i>Myriophora</i>(Diptera: Phoridae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Myriophora is a near globally distributed species-rich genus whose members are parasitoids of toxic, chemically defended millipedes. Prior to this study, only eight species were described, little was known about how they interacted with millipedes, and no phylogenetic hypotheses of intrageneric relationships had been proposed, resulting in a wide range of available directions to pursue understanding the natural history of Myriophora. The approach taken here is primarily from a systematics standpoint of understanding species level diversity, distribution, and relationships, but with the intent of layering on data from field observations and experiments to not only increase basic biological knowledge of Myriophora but to also then inform and enhance the primary systematics goals. To make feasible taxonomic headway under the time constraint of a Ph.D. project, the taxonomic revision focused only on the New World taxa, resulting in the description of 57 new species, covering a geographic area from Argentina to Canada. Several experiments were carried out aimed at determining how Myriophora locate millipedes. After concluding that the secretions are used as the long-range cue for host-finding, individual components of the benzoquinone blend were tested for attractiveness, and it was found that of the two predominate quinone components in the defensive blend of juliform millipedes, 2-methoxy-3-methyl-1,4-benzoquinone alone attracts adult flies of both sexes, and that a combination of 2-methoxy-3-methyl-1,4-benzoquinone and 2-methyl-1,4-benzoquinone increased attractiveness. Finally, to understand these findings in an evolutionary context, morphological and molecular character data were used to estimate the phylogeny of Myriophora. We find that the ancestral area of Myriophora is the New World and a single dispersal event to the Old World likely occurred via a Beringian connection before subsequently spreading to the Afrotropical Region. The ancestral host reconstructed for Myriophora is the benzoquinone-producing Juliformia, and this association has been conserved in the Old World clade. Species of Myriophora associated with the cyanide-producing millipedes are restricted to a single New World clade.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".