Dung beetles (Scarabaeidae: Scarabaeinae) attracted to carrion in Ghana, West Africa and evidence for adult food source plasticity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A study on dung beetles attracted to carrion using baited pitfalls was conducted in eight Upper Guinean wet and moist forest sites as well as one savannah site in Ghana, West Africa. A total of 42 species and 1380 individuals were collected from all sites. The highest diversity was found in the Shai Hills savannah with 19 species while the lowest total of only four species was collected in the Cape Three Points forest. The forest sites combined had seven unique species while the savannah locality had 12 unique taxa. Most carrion feeders belong to the genus Onthophagus; Onthophagus liberianus made up 23% of the total catch and together with the next nine most abundant species accounted for 78% of the specimens collected. Two dung beetle tribes of African savannah species not noted as carrion feeders were strongly attracted to vertebrate carrion and included a member of the Oniticellini, Latodrepanus caelatus (Gerst.) and the Onitini, Onitis cupreus Castelnau. Additionally, a forest species of Sisyphini, Neosisyphus angulicollis Felsche, that is uncommon on carrion was attracted to carrion in large numbers. For two species, Onthophagus liberianus and O. rufopygus, studied herein and previously in the Ivory Coast, the relative attractiveness of carrion and dung in each country varied greatly, demonstrating behavioral plasticity in food choice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".