Population Dynamics of the Western Tent Caterpillar: The Roles of Fecundity, Disease and Temperature
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many populations of forest Lepidoptera exhibit regular periodic cycles in abundance. Explicit mechanisms for such dynamics however, remain a subject of debate in Ecology. I used annual field data (1977-2015) from a cyclical species of forest Lepidoptera native to southwestern B.C., the western tent caterpillar (Malacosoma californicum pluviale), to elucidate how fecundity, viral disease and temperature contribute to its dynamics. Using time-series analysis and relationships between lagged population density, disease prevalence and annual population growth rate, I demonstrated that cyclical dynamics can be generated. I then used AIC model selection to show that fecundity and lagged population density had the greatest contributions to annual population rate of increase, followed by disease prevalence and warmer spring temperatures during larval development. Using these factors, I constructed a population model capable of generating population cycles similar to those observed in the field. These results indicate that fecundity, density-dependent disease prevalence and temperature contribute significantly to the cyclical dynamics of these populations.
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.
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) | 0.000 | 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 it