First Reports of Vespa mandarinia (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) in North America Represent Two Separate Maternal Lineages in Washington State, United States, and British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In September 2019, destruction of a Vespa mandarinia Smith 1852 nest was reported for the first time in North America in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada. In December 2019, the Washington State Department of Agriculture also confirmed the first detection of an adult specimen of V. mandarinia in the United States, in Whatcom County, Washington. Vespa mandarinia is the largest hornet species and is a known predator of several insects, including the European honey bee (Apis mellifera) (Hymenoptera: Apidae) (Linnaeus, 1758). The establishment of V. mandarinia in North America poses a serious threat to apiculture, and this species is considered an actionable quarantine pest. Here we report details of the first detection of this species in the United States and use genetic sequence data obtained from five specimens across the globe to estimate differences in origin of the Canadian and U.S. detections. The full mitochondrial genomes of four V. mandarinia specimens representing different geographic locations were sequenced and compared with an existing reference genome. A maximum likelihood tree using 13 protein-coding regions from mitochondrial DNA suggests that the Canada and U.S. specimens are from two separate maternal lineages. A large-scale survey is currently underway to assess the level of Asian giant hornet establishment in both countries and to determine the future direction of eradication efforts.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".