Nearctic female <i>Agriotes pubescens</i> and Palearctic female <i>A. lineatus</i> (Coleoptera: Elateridae) produce the same sex pheromone
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In central Canada, surveys for the three invasive (Palearctic) Agriotes species-A. obscurus, A. lineatus, and A. sputator-commonly collect A. pubescens, a North American native (Nearctic) click beetle (Coleoptera: Elateridae) that generally co-occurs with Nearctic A. mancus. Despite the abundance of A. pubescens on farmland, its life history and potential economic impact remain largely unknown. Here, we report the identification and field testing of the A. pubescens sex pheromone. We collected headspace volatiles from a single female beetle on Porapak Q, then extracted the female's pheromone gland, and analyzed aliquots of both Porapak extract and pheromone gland extract by gas chromatographic-electroantennographic detection (GC-EAD) and by GC-mass spectrometry. In GC-EAD recordings of gland extract, two esters-geranyl butanoate and geranyl octanoate-elicited antennal responses from A. pubescens males. In a field experiment in Quebec, traps baited with a 1:1 blend of these esters captured approximately 100× more A. pubescens males than traps baited with a single ester. This is the same trap lure used for capturing A. lineatus. In this experiment, and in a similar one run in British Columbia, heterospecific pheromone components added to conspecific pheromone lures reduced captures of A. mancus, A. sputator, A. lineatus, and A. obscurus by 29%, 96%, 44%, and 71%, respectively. These data indicate that, in North America, lures containing pheromone components of multiple Agriotes congeners may not be optimally attractive to all target species.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".