Prevalence of Winter Ticks (Dermacentor albipictus) in Hunter-Harvested Wild Elk (Cervus canadensis) from Pennsylvania, USA (2017–2018)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Winter ticks (Dermacentor albipictus) are an aggressive one-host tick that infest a wide-diversity of ungulates. Infestations can result in anemia, alopecia, emaciation, and death. Most notably, the winter tick has caused negative impacts to moose (Alces alces) populations in the northeast United States and Canada. Winter ticks have been identified on other cervid species, including deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and elk (Cervus canadensis), which generally results in low tick burdens and mild or no disease. Recently, however, a wild yearling bull elk in Pennsylvania was found dead as a result of severe winter tick infestation. To obtain baseline data on winter ticks in wild elk in Pennsylvania, we collected 1453 ticks from 190 hunter-harvested wild elk between 2017–2018. Of the 204 harvested elk, 94.3% (190/204) had ticks collected for this study and none of the sampled elk had evidence of winter-tick associated disease. The average tick burden was 7.7 ticks/elk and average winter tick load on all elk was 0.5. Results of this study indicate that winter ticks do infest wild elk in Pennsylvania. However, during the fall months, the tick burden is low and rarely associated with lesions. These data herein serve as a baseline to monitor winter tick populations over time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".