Effect of a juvenile hormone analogue (methoprene) on ovarian development and survival in the Eastern Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa virginica)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Differences in opportunities to lay eggs, and thus differences in extent of ovarian development, underlie reproductive hierarchies in social insects. In most insects, ovarian development is regulated by juvenile hormone (JH), so differences in reproduction are predicted to be proximately regulated by JH. We investigated the impact of a JH analogue, methoprene, on ovarian development and survival in Xylocopa virginica, a facultatively social carpenter bee in which social females form linear dominance hierarchies quite different from eusocial societies. Our objectives were twofold: to evaluate variation in the ovarian status of potential breeders throughout the brood-producing phase of the colony cycle, and to investigate the extent to which methoprene treatment would increase ovarian development. We used a double-blind experiment in which wild-caught females were treated with 0, 100, 500, or 1000 µg of methoprene, maintained in cages for two to four days, and then either? killed and dissected or maintained in the lab until the majority had died naturally. Control females exhibited a distinct seasonal pattern in which ovarian development increased through the first part of the brood-provisioning phase to a peak in weeks 7 and 8 (mid-June), then subsequently declined, as brood production ceased. Methoprene treatment resulted in a dose-dependent increase in ovarian development, primarily affecting the volume of mature oocytes, but having no effect on the total number of developing oocytes. The effects of methoprene were observed within two days of treatment, suggesting rapid hormonal modulation of ovarian development. No significant differences in survival were observed among bees treated with varying dosages of methoprene, indicating the absence of adverse effects on bee health and activity. Our results support the predicted gonadotropic effects of methoprene in X. virginica, enabling future studies to explore JH influence on reproductive dominance within linear reproductive hierarchies.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".