Species boundaries among extremely diverse and sexually dimorphic <i>Arrenurus</i> water mites (Acariformes: Hydrachnidiae: Arrenuridae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Arrenurus (Arrenuridae) is the most species-rich genus of mites with about 950 named species that inhabit standing, and to a lesser extent, running water habitats around the world. To date, distinguishing species of Arrenurus has been based on male reproductive morphology. Here, we use morphological and molecular approaches to examine species boundaries among 42 named species of Arrenurus , including four named species that have colour variants (red and green A. americanus , and red and blue A. intermedius, A. manubriator and A. apetiolatus ), and two unnamed morphospecies. In this study, we examine male genital structures with the use of SEM techniques, and apply mitochondrial (COI barcode region) and nuclear (28S rRNA) gene fragments to test whether male morphology reflects species boundaries in Arrenurus assessed by molecular analyses. Our results reveal that male reproductive morphology parallels species boundaries as judged by molecular data. We discuss the cases of genetically poorly diversified, yet morphologically clearly defined named species. Moreover, we show that based on the species we examined, colour morphs within otherwise morphologically similar specimens represent within-species variation and, in the absence of other diagnostic traits, colour itself can be misleading in distinguishing species. Our outcomes on molecular taxonomy of Arrenurus provide a background for testing hypotheses about speciation rate in water mites.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".