Host‐choice by a specialist folivore reflects trade‐offs between foliage quality and parasitism risks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
1. The spruce budworm, Choristoneura fumiferana Clem., is an important outbreaking pest of balsam fir, Abies balsamea (L.) Mill, and black spruce, Picea mariana (Mill.) Britton, Sterns & Poggenb., throughout the boreal forests of North America. 2. Despite several studies reporting higher performance for larvae on balsam fir versus those on black spruce, many females still lay eggs on spruce. In this 2‐year study, we explored possible tri‐trophic trade‐offs associated with host selection taking into account both larval overwintering and feeding periods. 3. Based on field surveys, parasitism rates were significantly higher for overwintering larvae on balsam fir than on black spruce in 2017. 4. Field bioassays confirmed past studies showing 21% higher larval survival on balsam fir versus black spruce, especially when larval emergence was synchronized with host budburst. 5. Considering both overwintering and feeding survival, overall spruce budworm performance was nearly equal between hosts, though larvae gained some advantage on balsam fir if larval feeding was synchronized with budburst. 6. These results suggest that female egg lay on both hosts may be a ‘bet‐hedging’ strategy that balances trade‐offs between higher parasitism and higher foliage quality on different potential host species.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".