Genomic insights into kin selection and developmental conflict in co-occurring hairworm parasites
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Many parasites manipulate the behaviour or appearance of their host to improve their own survival or transmission, with manipulation timing tightly linked to a parasite’s developmental stage. However, host manipulations are complicated by the presence of co-occurring parasites within the same host. Conspecific co-occurring parasites of similar developmental stages may interact collaboratively to manipulate a host. However, co-occurring parasites of different developmental stages will conflict with one another, especially when the manipulation is fatal to developmentally immature co-occurring parasites. Kin selection further complicates these interactions by predicting that closely related co-occurring parasites may not interfere with the other’s manipulation. Co-occurring hairworm (Nematomorpha) parasites are common, and the water-seeking manipulation mature worms induce is probably lethal to co-occurring juvenile worms. To understand the role that kin selection may have on these interactions, we assess kin relationships in a wild hairworm population. We sequence, to our knowledge the first, New Zealand hairworm (Gordius paranensis) genome and use reduced representation sequencing to estimate relatedness among co-occurring worms. We show that co-occurring hairworm relatedness varies from unrelated to highly related and that both mature and immature worms inhabit the same host. We discuss how these developmental and kinship dynamics may shape host manipulations and hairworm survival.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".