Tachinid Flies (Diptera), Caterpillar Hosts (Lepidoptera) and Their Food Plants, Reared in Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), Northwestern Costa Rica: Documenting Community Structure with the Aid of DNA Barcodes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We describe the trophic relationships of tachinid parasitoid flies that attack exophagous, leaf-eating Lepidoptera caterpillars in Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), northwestern Costa Rica over approximately forty years beginning in 1984. The dataset contains more than 34,000 individual tachinid rearings from individual wild-caught caterpillars. Identification of parasitoids and caterpillars up until 2004 was based entirely on morphology. From 2004 onwards most reared specimens were DNA-barcoded and some retroactive barcoding was also carried out with varying degrees of success. Generally, for older specimens, generating good quality-barcodes requires more expensive protocols. Barcoding of reared specimens led to the recognition that many morpho-species were made up of multiple species of flies but those reared from an individual caterpillar were 99.95% a single species. Consequently, estimates of diet breadth of caterpillars and tachinids changed considerably after 2003. The data analysed here were pruned to include only rearings with complete host and food plant data and excluded potentially duplicated rearings and ones whose identification could not be confidently assigned. The cleaned dataset includes 13,735 independent rearings. Chao1 estimates of numbers of tachinid, caterpillar and food plant species suggest that species sampling is 86, 70 and 91 percent complete, respectively. However, this was not the case for bi- and tritrophic interactions which increased linearly with effort. We show that while the tachinids of ACG are more host-specialised than was expected prior to the combined efforts of rearing and barcoding, they have broader host ranges and higher host Shannon diversity indices than either Braconidae or Ichneumonidae. This may be attributable to the effects of the induced host-derived sac enclosing the larvae and their posterior spiracles.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".