First records of Dermacentor albipictus larvae collected by flagging in Yukon, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The winter tick (Dermacentor albipictus) has garnered significant attention throughout North America for its impact on wildlife health, and especially for moose (Alces alces), where high tick burdens may result in host hair loss, anemia, and can prove fatal. The environmental transmission of D. albipictus larvae to a host is a critical event that has direct impact on infestation success, yet in-field observations of this life stage are lacking. In Yukon, Canada, D. albipictus had previously been found on hosts, but its larval life stage had not been detected in the field, despite previous sampling attempts. METHODS: We sampled for D. albipictus larvae using traditional flagging methods in Ibex Valley and Braeburn, Yukon. Sites were sampled repeatedly for D. albipictus larvae by flagging from late August to end of October in 2018 and late August to end of November 2019. RESULTS: . Larvae were present primarily on grassy vegetation on south-facing slopes in the Ibex Valley region and in Braeburn. Highest average larval numbers suggest peak questing activity was towards the end of September and beginning of October, as elsewhere in North America. CONCLUSIONS: To the best of our knowledge, we report the first successful collection of the off-host, larval life stage of D. albipictus by flagging, north of 60° latitude in Yukon, Canada. These new observations provide critical information on the spatial distribution of the host-seeking life stage of D. albipictus and confirm that this species is completing its whole life cycle in southern Yukon. Understanding the environmental conditions where larvae spend their vulnerable period off-host in this northern location can inform both management strategies and projections of future range expansion which may occur with a changing climate.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".