Extraordinary diversification of the “bristle flies” (Diptera: Tachinidae) and its underlying causes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The family Tachinidae (“bristle flies”) is the most diverse and ecologically important group of insect parasitoids outside the parasitic wasps. It is among the most species rich families of flies (Diptera) and has experienced a recent adaptive radiation across the globe. We make use of a molecular phylogeny of the family to examine its rapid radiation and explore the traits of tachinid lineages that may have contributed to variation in their diversification. We apply a range of diversification analyses to assess the consistency and robustness of effects. We find that the Tachinidae are among the most rapidly diversifying families of animals. Six to eight clades of bristle flies, distributed across the phylogeny, exhibit strong evidence of accelerated diversification. Our results suggest that the use of holometabolous insect larvae, and specifically caterpillars (Lepidoptera), as hosts, is associated with increased diversification rates. However, these effects were inconsistent across analyses. We detected little influence of oviposition strategy (egg type) or host feeding habit, and we recovered evidence that unmeasured “hidden” traits may explain greater variance in diversification. We evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of different Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian approaches for analysing diversification and the potential for extrinsic factors, such as geography, to influence patterns of richness and diversification. In general, we conclude that although certain traits may provide opportunities for diversification, whether this is capitalized on may depend on additional traits and/or historical contingency.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 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".