The use of social media to document a range extension of an iconic social parasite ant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ants of the genus Polyergus latreille are large (4.8-7.5 mm), brightly coloured daytime active ants from numerous locations across the holarctic with obligate social parasitic behaviour that includes highly visible mid-afternoon "raids" conducted against species of Formica linnaeus that has entrenched their iconic status amongst many myrmecologists (Trager 203).Accordingly, their presence in an area is often well documented.Thus, a novel location, especially a northern range extension, is worth reporting.We describe here one such interesting range extension that was identified and confirmed with the assistance of social media.Ants of the species Polyergus lucidus Mayr were collected from Killbear Provincial Park (45.3589, -80.234), near Parry Sound Ontario by McDonald and Kent in late August 206.The previously known most northerly collection in canada was made by gary Umphrey at Pinery Provincial Park, near grand Bend Ontario (43.259, -8.8276).While Ellison et al. ( 202) observed that P. lucidus specializes on Formica incerta Buren, the host ant species was neither observed nor collected at Killbear.The Killbear specimens of Polyergus were collected in the disturbed areas adjacent to the visitors centre parking lot and then shipped to the University of guelph where Smith pointed and photographed the ants with the assistance of Smith lab students and volunteers using a leica Z6 APOA Macroscope and the leica Application Suite V4.3.These photos allowed the species identification to be confirmed (Fig. ). in a recent revision, Trager (203) resurrected many species that creighton (950) had previously synonymised into species with broad geographic distributions.Based on this revision, our contemporary understanding of the species of Polyergus is now more geographically associated.The collection reported here represents a range extension of approximately 270 km to the north-east for Polyergus lucidus (Fig 2, Table ). in an attempt
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".