Arctic fleas are not fussy eaters: <i>Bartonella</i> bacteria may hitchhike between birds and mammals in a tundra ecosystem
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within the terrestrial Arctic ecosystem at Karrak Lake, Nunavut, Bartonella bacteria ( B. vinsonii subsp. berkhoffii and B. henselae) have been detected in avian nest fleas ( Ceratophyllus vagabundus vagabundus) and the blood of Arctic foxes ( Vulpes lagopus (Linnaeus, 1758)). We further investigate the transmission dynamics at Karrak Lake by identifying Bartonella present in rodents, migratory geese upon arrival to nesting grounds, and rodent and avian fleas. Conventional PCR targeting the 16S–23S rRNA intergenic transcribed spacer region revealed DNA of B. vinsonii subsp. berkhoffii and B. rochalimae in 42% of 24 nest flea pools, B. rochalimae and B. grahamii in 70% of 10 rodent flea pools ( Amalaraeus dissimilis), B. grahamii, B. vinsonii subsp. berkhoffii, and Bartonella sp. BvS12 in 20% of 20 red-backed voles ( Myodes rutilus (Pallas, 1779)), and B. vinsonii subsp. berkhoffii in 2% of 42 Ross's geese ( Anser rossii Cassin, 1861). These findings suggest that geese and their associated fleas serve as migratory hosts and vectors. Detection of the same or similar species of Bartonella in rodent fleas, nest fleas, and foxes proposes that transmission may occur during predation, and detection of B. rochalimae (a Bartonella species commonly detected in rodents) in nest fleas may suggest that these fleas have generalist feeding tendencies, acquiring Bartonella from rodents or foxes as they visit nests.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".