SLENDER-TAILED MEERKAT (Suricata suricatta) FATALITIES ATTRIBUTED TO NEORICKETTSIOSIS ASSOCIATED WITH INTESTINAL TREMATODIASIS (PARALECITHODENDRIUM NAVICULUM)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Paralecithodendrium naviculum (Trematoda) is a common parasite of bats in North America. This organism has occasionally also been reported in raccoons and mink. Lecithodendriid trematodes are multiple life stage parasites which use snails as the first intermediate host and aquatic arthropods (insects and crayfish) as the infective intermediate host. Meerkats at the Toledo Zoo have traditionally been offered crayfish (Cambarus diogenes) as seasonally available enrichment. In June 2012, three of four slender-tailed meerkats (Suricata suricatta) developed acute lethargy, cardiac and respiratory distress, then died either shortly after empirical treatment was initiated or before any treatment could be initiated. Histologic examination revealed intestinal trematodiasis and systemic lymphoplasmacytic inflammation, most notably in the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, spleen, and skeletal muscle. Paralecithodendrium naviculum was identified in all three meerkats and in the crayfish. Rickettsiaceae were identified in liver tissue by transmission electron microscopy. A novel Neorickettsia species was identified in tissues from all three meerkats by PCR followed by sequencing. This disease, which resembles salmon poisoning in canids, has not been previously reported in meerkats. This study identifies a potential risk of live enrichment feeding. It also highlights the risks of exposing animals in zoos to organisms to which they are evolutionarily naive.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 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".