Whirling disease in the Crowsnest River: an emerging threat to wild salmonids in Alberta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We provide the first documented case of whirling disease (WD) impacts to wild, self-sustaining rainbow trout (RNTR, Oncorynchus mykiss) populations in Canada. Myxobolus cerebralis (Mc), the causative agent of WD, was first confirmed in Alberta in 2016. However, evidence of disease in local fish populations was unknown. Using a weight-of-evidence approach, we examined multiple parasite life cycle stages in the Crowsnest River, Alberta. Percentage of infected Tubifex tubifex worms actively shedding triactinomyxons (TAMs) exceeded known thresholds of Mc establishment and TAM densities instream exceeded thresholds known to cause ≥90% declines in RNTR populations. Mc was detected at 5 of 6 study sites in water, fish, and worms. Disease severity was highest in the lower watershed where 100% of sentinel fish tested positive for Mc 7 to 14 days post-exposure; up to 85% of wild fingerling RNTR showed clinical signs of disease and yearling trout were largely absent from the river suggesting reduced survival. Our findings indicate conditions necessary for outbreak of WD exist in Alberta, highlighting the need to consider this disease as an emerging threat to wild salmonid populations.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".