Potential Crawling Distance for an Invading Urban Tree Pest: Implications for Settling Decisions and Between-Tree Movement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Scale insects are prevalent urban landscape pests and are considered to move between neighboring trees via wind-aided and phoretic dispersal by cryptic, short-lived crawlers. Crawling likely plays a central role in these dispersal processes by shaping their ability to move onto phoretic hosts or to locate host plants and/or settling locations after being blown off a tree. Additionally, walking capabilities of crawlers drive on-tree movement, such as how far they disperse before settling. Here, we studied movement of the damaging, non-native crapemyrtle bark scale (CMBS), Acanthococcus lagerstroemiae (Hemiptera: Eriococcidae). We aimed to determine survival times for crawlers under starved conditions, evaluated crawler walking distances on various substrates, and combined survival times and walking distances from these experiments to simulate potential walking distances over the lifetime of the crawler stage and 1, 6, 12, 18, 24, 48, and 72-h intervals. We found that half of the crawlers survived approximately three days, with < 25% surviving up to seven days. On different substrates, crawlers walked five times farther on average on carboard than white posterboard over 15-min periods; crawling distances did not significantly vary during 5-min trials using colored construction paper, however. Combining these results, we estimated crawlers could move a median distance of 62 m (range: 2–211 m) if they walked for the entirety of their life as a crawler. These findings provide insight into a vulnerable life stage of scale insects and suggest that crawlers blown off of trees could walk to new hosts and easily move between adjacent trees.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".