Permission to bite: White‐footed mice show no increased grooming response to tick infestation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The presence of parasites can significantly influence animal behavior. Specifically, grooming behavior may have evolved in part as a response to the physical and psychological challenges induced by parasitism. Grooming behaviors, which can be individual or social, help remove parasites, maintain hygiene, and offer stress relief. These interactions underscore the adaptive coping strategies of animals for environmental challenges, highlighting the role of parasites in shaping animal behavior and survival. A continual rise in human cases of vector‐borne disease demands a more detailed understanding of how ticks interact with their host species that usually serve as pathogen reservoirs. White‐footed mice (Peromyscus leucopus) are one of the most frequently studied hosts of blacklegged ticks (Ixodes scapularis); however, interactions between white‐footed mice and ticks are not easily observed. This study aimed to quantify activity patterns in white‐footed mice and to assess their behavioral responses to parasitism by blacklegged ticks within a controlled setting using Ethovision® software. White‐footed mice were infested with nymphal blacklegged ticks or evaluated without tick infestation over 4 days. The mean number of ticks on the mice after the infestation period was 19.6 ± 5.9, and the mean number of ticks that attached and fed through the duration of the trial on the infested mice out of these was 8.6 ± 4.4. Grooming frequency was not significantly affected by tick parasitism, regardless of the number of attached ticks. While this study was the first to quantify behavior in lab‐reared white‐footed mice in response to blacklegged tick parasitism, further work is needed to determine how wild‐caught white‐footed mouse behavior might differ.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.050 | 0.019 |
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".