Tick Paralysis in a Snowshoe Hare by Ixodes pacificus Ticks in British Columbia, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We provide the first reported case of tick paralysis in a wildlife animal caused by the western blacklegged tick, Ixodes pacificus Cooley & Kohls. Six I. pacificus females and one male were collected from a feral Snowshoe Hare roaming the coastal area of southwestern British Columbia, Canada. When the hare was rescued from the forest habitat, it was unable to walk, and showed typical symptoms of tick paralysis, including ascending flaccid paralysis. At the nearby wildlife rehabilitation centre, engorged I. pacificus females were collected from the hare. Because of the rapid progress of tick paralysis, the Snowshoe Hare, Lepus americanus Erxleben, died shortly after the start of rehabilitation. X-rays were normal, and reveal no physical injury. Since the Lyme disease spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato (s.l) Johnson, Schmid, Hyde, Steigerwalt, and Brenner, was circulating enzootically in this area, we tested all ticks infesting the Snowshoe Hare. Using PCR, a single male was positive for B. burgdorferi s.l., whereas all of the attached I. pacificus females were negative. Since only the single I. pacificus male was infected with Lyme disease spirochetes, we intuitively conclude that the engorged I. pacificus females were the cause of tick paralysis. Medical practitioners and wildlife rehabilitators are advised to consider tick paralysis in their differential diagnosis when people, livestock, companion animals, and wildlife animals present with acute ascending motor deficits after exposure in grassy and wooded areas.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".