The Chinese giant salamander exemplifies the hidden extinction of cryptic species
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
Overexploitation, habitat destruction, human-driven climate change and disease spread are resulting in the extinction of innumerable species, with amphibians being hit harder than most other groups [1Wake D.B. Vredenburg V.T. Are we in the midst of the sixth mass extinction? A view from the world of amphibians.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 2008; 105: 11466-11473Crossref PubMed Scopus (1152) Google Scholar]. Few species of amphibians are widespread, and those that are often represent complexes of multiple cryptic species. This is especially true for range-restricted salamanders [2Wu Y.H. Murphy R.W. Concordant species delimitation from multiple independent evidence: A case study with the Pachytriton brevipes complex (Caudata: Salamandridae).Mol. Phylogenet. Evol. 2015; 92: 108-117Crossref PubMed Scopus (10) Google Scholar]. Here, we used the widespread and critically endangered Chinese giant salamander (Andrias davidianus) to show how genetically uninformed management efforts can negatively affect species conservation. We find that this salamander consists of at least five species-level lineages. However, the extensive recent translocation of individuals between farms, where the vast majority of extant salamanders now live, has resulted in genetic homogenization. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplotypes from northern China now predominate in farms. Unfortunately, hybrid offspring are being released back into the wild under well-intentioned, but misguided, conservation management. Our findings emphasize the necessity of genetic assessments for seemingly well-known, widespread species in conservation initiatives. Species serve as the primary unit for protection and management in conservation actions [3Mace G.M. The role of taxonomy in species conservation.Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 2004; 359: 711-719Crossref PubMed Scopus (539) Google Scholar], so determining the taxonomic status of threatened species is a major concern, especially for amphibians. The level of threat to amphibians may be underestimated, and existing conservation strategies may be inadvertently harmful if conducted without genetic assessment.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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