The Northern Widow Spider, Latrodectus Variolus (Araneae: Theridiiae), in Michigan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Until recently the species of widow spider occurring in Michigan was considered a variant of the black widow, Latrodectus mactans (Fabricius). Levi (1959) summarized and revised the worldwide genus Latrodectus, placing the southern areas of Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa as the northern limit of mactans on the North American continent. Widow spiders located north of this became part of the widespread curacaviensis group. After further information was available, McCrone and Levi (1964) revised the curacaviensis group, establishing the species that extended north of mactans as the northern widow, L. variolus, originally described by Walckenaer (183v). L. variolus is the most northern representative of the genus in North America, but its range extends from southern Canada and the northern States south to northern Florida west through Texas to central California. It is sympatric with L. mactans in many southern states , and it is sympatric with both L. mactans and L. bishopi in Florida (McCrone and Levi, 1964). The northern widow is known from many localities in Michigan, but in recent years it has been abundant in the northwestern part of the Lower Peninsula--particularly in Kalkaska, Grand Traverse, and Wexford counties. McCrone and Levi (1964) recorded specimens from Calhoun, Cheboygan, and Barry counties. In addition, specimens have been collected or reported from Antrim, Charlevoix, Crawford, Emmet, Livingston, Otsego, and Wayne counties. Observations were made in several localities in 1965 and 1966 in order to learn more about this spider's coloration, abundance, and habits.
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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".