Variation in life-history traits of <i>Plasmodium mexicanum</i>, a malaria parasite infecting western fence lizards: a longitudinal study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The life history of malaria parasites (Plasmodium spp.) is directly related to their transmission, virulence, and population dynamics. I followed the life history of Plasmodium mexicanum in naturally infected western fence lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis) over a 4-year period, using a mark-recapture technique. The life-history traits measured included peak parasitemias and population growth rates of asexual forms, gametocytes, and total parasites. Among malaria infections, variation was high for all measured traits. Growth rates varied up to 11-fold, and among stable infections, average asexual parasitemias ranged from 0.2 to 13.2 and gametocytemias from 0.5 to 66.2 parasites per 1000 erythrocytes. This variation was not related to infection prevalences, which were similar among years and between male and female hosts. Host age and gender were not related to peak parasitemia or average growth rate of asexual forms. However, the growth rate of gametoctyes was higher in older lizards. Gametocytemia and parasitemia were significantly higher late in the warm season, when sand-fly vectors are active. These data reveal that life-history traits of P. mexicanum are highly variable within an infected host population, and that the variation is partially related to the age of the infected host or the time of year the host was examined.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".