Symbiont diversity in the eukaryotic microbiomes of marine crustacean zooplankton
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Protists (eukaryotic microorganisms) commonly form symbiotic associations with crustacean zooplankton, but their diversity, prevalence and ecological roles are underestimated due to the limited scope of previous investigations. Using metabarcoding of the V4 region of the 18S rRNA gene, we characterized the eukaryotic microbiomes of the dominant crustacean zooplankton, specifically copepods, euphausiids, amphipods and ostracods, from the Strait of Georgia, Canada. Sequence reads from the alveolates dominated all zooplankton examined, which mostly comprised ciliates and dinoflagellates of known symbiont lineages. These lineages included not only those of parasitoids but also those of uncharacterized species. Apostome ciliate reads were the most abundant in all hosts except for cyclopoid copepods, which were dominated by the parasitic Syndiniales. Most symbiont lineages showed some degree of host preference, particularly Pseudocolliniidae ciliate parasites with ostracods, but were often detected in all hosts indicating broad host specificity. Reads from free-living protists, including diatoms and surprisingly hydrozoans, were inferred to be part of their diet. Hydrozoans may have been ingested from free organic matter, such as detritus or marine snow, suggesting a likely underestimated pathway of carbon cycling. This investigation contributes to resolving the interactions between zooplankton and protists and the potential ecological significance of symbioses on zooplankton productivity.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".