Plasticity drives extreme cold tolerance of emerald ash borer (Agrilus planipennis) during a polar vortex
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Invasive species must often survive combinations of environmental conditions that differ considerably from their native range; however, for a given species it is unclear whether improved tolerance is the result of phenotypic plasticity or genetic adaptation (or both). Agrilus planipennis (Coleoptera: Buprestidae; the emerald ash borer) is an invasive pest of Fraxinus trees in North America and Europe. Previous studies in SW Ontario, Canada, showed that A. planipennis is freeze avoidant, preventing internal ice formation by accumulating Molar concentrations of glycerol in its hemolymph and depressing its supercooling point (SCP, the temperature at which it freezes). The cold tolerance of these SW Ontario animals was used to predict potential distribution, revealing that some Canadian cities should be too cold to allow populations to persist. However, a small population of A. planipennis has persisted in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, through several severe ‘polar vortex’ events. In 2018/19, we collected A. planipennis larvae and prepupae from Winnipeg, MB and Southern Ontario, and found that individuals from Winnipeg were extremely cold tolerant – with SCPs as low as -52°C in prepupae (compared to -32°C in SW Ontario), and observed survival of unfrozen individuals exposed to -50°C for one hour. This cold tolerance was accompanied by higher hemolymph osmolality and glycerol concentration than in the SW Ontario individuals. To distinguish between phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation, in 2020/21 we overwintered Winnipeg-sourced individuals either outdoors in SW Ontario or in a simulated Winnipeg winter. Simulated Winnipeg winter individuals had cold tolerance similar to those overwintered in Winnipeg, while SW Ontario overwintered individuals had cold tolerance similar to those collected previously in the region. The simulated winter individuals had higher hemolymph glycerol concentrations than SW Ontario overwintered animals, at least in part due to greater dehydration. Thus, A. planipennis are cold-tolerant enough to survive some of the harshest winters where their host trees can grow, and most likely attain this cold tolerance via phenotypic plasticity. These findings raise the importance of delineating sensitivity of conclusions to unexpected phenotypic plasticity when predicting potential distributions of new invasives or responses to climate change.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 it