Rickettsia spp. and its Effects on the Physiology and Behaviour of Dermacentor Variabilis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The genus Rickettsia is home to a number of species of endobacteria that infect vertebrates as well as invertebrates, some of these species being pathogenic. Rickettsia bacteria are transmitted to mammals by Dermacentor variabilis ticks in North America, but while pathogenic effects in mammals have been well described, the effect of the bacteria in ticks is less well explored. Experiments were performed to determine how the physiology and behaviour of the Dermacentor variabilis (Say) (Arachnida: Ixodidae) are affected by infection with Rickettsia bacteria. DNA analysis was used to determine the presence of Rickettsia genus in ticks. The supercooling point (SCP), fat content, and temperature preference were compared between infected and uninfected ticks. Infection incidence with Rickettsia spp. was 45.8% in males, 46.4% in unengorged females and 48.3 % in engorged females. Eggs were more resistant to freezing, followed by larvae, then adult ticks. There was no change in the temperature preference between males vs. engorged females, and females vs. engorged females. The presence of Rickettsia spp. did not significantly affect supercooling point, fat content and water content. However, there was a difference between infected and uninfected females, both engorged and unengorged, in temperature preference. We conclude that in both, engorged and unengorged female ticks, Rickettsia bacteria affect their behaviour but not physiology.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".