To host or not to host: participation of the exotic snail Viviparus georgianus in the swimmer’s itch parasite life cycle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Swimmer's itch is a disease that can cause severe rashes on human skin, and is common in many recreational lakes in North America.The parasite responsible for this disease is an aquatic digenean trematode larva (cercaria) of the genus Trichobilharzia which has a complex life cycle.It needs two hosts to complete its cycle: a waterfowl as a definitive host and a snail (normally from Lymnaeidae, Physidae or Planorbidae families) as an intermediate host.So far, no study has mentioned the exotic banded mystery snail, Viviparus georgianus (syn: Callinina georgiana), as a host of this parasite.The aim of this project was to determine whether V. georgianus can be an intermediate host of the parasite responsible for swimmer's itch.To verify this, we compared the infection prevalence rates of native and exotic snails in Lake Memphremagog (Quebec, Canada).After a 17 hour-exposure to artificial light at room temperature, snails were tested for cercarial infection.None of the V. georgianus released cercariae.Based on these results, we have not found any evidence to suggest that V. georgianus is an intermediate host of the parasite species.However, two indigenous snails Ladislavella sp.(Family: Lymnaeidae) and Helisoma anceps (Family: Planorbidae) were confirmed to release cercariae.The prevalence of the infection in native snails was 5% and the estimated average cercariae was between 60 to 1900 per 100 ml.Here, we present evidence that the exotic banded mystery snail does not contribute to the life cycle of the swimmer's itch parasite in Quebec.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 teacher head, 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".