The enemy of my enemy is my friend: Consumption of parasite infectious stages benefits hosts and predators depending on transmission mode
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research Highlight: Hobart, B. K., Moss, W. E., McDevitt-Galles, T., Stewart Merrill, T. E., Johnson, P. T. J. (2021). It's a worm-eat-worm world: Consumption of parasite free-living stages protects hosts and benefits predators. Journal of Animal Ecology, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13591 Many parasites and pathogens have infectious stages that are vulnerable to consumption by non-host organisms. This consumption can benefit both the predators that consume this unusual food resource and the hosts which are less likely to encounter infectious propagules. Yet the importance of these benefits may also depend on parasite transmission, which can influence consumer opportunities to feed upon free-living infectious stages. Hobart et al. (2021) report that freshwater snails with high densities of symbiotic oligochaetes are less likely to be parasitized by trematodes (Platyhelminthes) with an 'active' versus 'passive' (motile or stationary, respectively) mode of transmission, supporting a protective effect via oligochaete predation upon infectious propagules. However, these predators benefit from snails harbouring passively acquired infections, and likely achieve their higher abundance from easy access to prey in the form of a second infectious stage emerging from these hosts. Consumption of free-living infectious stages is thus beneficial to hosts and predators, but varies with parasite life history and ecology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".