Competition between parasitoids of the cabbage seedpod weevil: effects on sex ratios and consequences for biological control
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In any biological control program, it is important to have an in-depth knowledge of the ecosystem. Competition between natural enemies can have unpredictable effects, potentially disrupting biological control of the pest in question. Trichomalus perfectus and Mesopolobus morys are two parasitoids of the cabbage seedpod weevil. Both are candidates for introduction as classical biological control agents in Canada. I examined the effects of intra- and interspecific parasitoid competition in field and laboratory experiments. I found that a multiple-species introduction would not be more effective at controlling pest populations than a single-species introduction. I also found T. perfectus produced a female-biased offspring sex ratio in response to intraspecific competition. Using a theoretical approach, I explored how this shift might affect parasitoid-host population dynamics and biological control, incorporating the influence of increased virginity in the parasitoid population.
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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".