Phylogenomics and the evolution of larval feeding habits in the blow flies (Diptera: Calliphoridae)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Blow flies (Diptera: Calliphoridae) occur worldwide and exhibit a wide range of larval feeding habits, including saprophagy, coprophagy, parasitism and predation. Understanding their biology is critical for medical and veterinary science and ecology. Calliphorids thrive across a range of habitats and exhibit complex life histories, with larvae developing immersed in their food substrate, while adults are free‐living and have diverse feeding strategies. Some species have evolved specialized parasitic associations with vertebrate or invertebrate hosts, which are behaviors with important implications for agriculture and for understanding evolutionary transitions between saprophagy and parasitism. This study presents a comprehensive phylogenetic analysis of the Calliphoridae, utilizing 711 of 736 analysed nuclear genes, using anchored hybrid enrichment, from a global collection of blow flies and their relatives. Our results provide a robust and novel reconstruction of the evolutionary history of this group, pinpointing major transitions in larval feeding habits. We argue that saprophagy evolved independently multiple times from invertebrate parasitic ancestors, with vertebrate parasitism emerging from a number of different feeding strategies. These findings challenge prior hypotheses and offer new insights into the adaptive traits driving trophic specialization and diversification in this group.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".