Global flea collection specimen details: Supplementary Table 1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A total of 5128 fleas (3585 female, 1520 male and 23 unknown) were collected from 57 countries across all continents (n = 6) except Antarctica, from October 2012 to March 2017. The most common flea was the cat flea Ctenocephalides felis (n = 4772; 93.0%) inclusive of three subspecies: Ctenocephalides felis felis (n = 3856), Ctenocephalides felis strongylus (n = 32) and Ctenocephalides felis damarensis (n = 4) as well as an additional number (n = 436) that were either unable to be assigned due to ambiguous morphologies (Ctenocephalides felis “transitional”; n = 29) or were not processed for slide-mounting and thus unable to be classified to subspecies level. The second most common flea including all non-Ctenocephalides species was the dog flea Ctenocephalides canis (n = 208; 4.1%) followed by the sticktight flea Echidnophaga gallinacea (n = 195; 3.8%), Ctenocephalides orientis (n = 194; 3.8%) and the human flea Pulex irritans (n = 119; 2.3%). The remaining 1% was represented by 8 species: Echidnophaga larina (n = 24), Ctenocephalides connatus (n = 12), Ceratophyllus gallinae (n = 7), Echidnophaga myrmecobii (n = 3), Nosopsyllus fasciatus (n = 1), Leptopsylla segnis (n = 1), Xenopsylla cheopis (n = 1) and Ceratophyllus sp. (n = 1). There was a total of 49 cases of mixed flea infestations on a single host with the most common sympatry occurring between C. felis and E. gallinacea (16 cases) followed by C. felis and C. orientis (11 cases), C. felis and C. canis (9 cases) and C. felis and P. irritans (7 cases). Fleas were predominantly collected from domestic dogs and cats. This included owned and stray dogs (Canis lupus familiaris; n = 541) and owned and feral cats (Felis catus; n = 228). An additional 33 samples were collected from either cats or dogs. Other canid hosts included red foxes (Vulpes vulpes; n = 99), jackals (Canis aureus; n = 4) and a wolf (Canis lupus signatus; n = 1). A small number of samples (n = 12) were collected from other hosts, both wild and domestic. These include four domestic goats (n = 7 fleas), five Cape ground squirrels (Xerus inauris) (n = 8 fleas), one slender mongoose (Galerella sanguinea) (n = 1 flea), one Rueppell`s Starling (Lamprotornis purpuropteraone) (n = 1 flea), two humans (n = 2 fleas) and one ferret (n= 1 flea). An average of 90 fleas were collected from each country ranging between 1 (Canada and Costa Rica) and 1093 (Australia) (median = 23) from a total of 937 hosts. The largest number of fleas including all species was obtained from Oceania (n = 1560), followed by Europe (n = 1283), Asia (including eastern Russia; n = 803), Africa (n = 742), South America (n = 412) and then North America (n = 323). Only two flea species were found across all continents: C. felis and C. canis. A further two species were present across multiple continents: Pulex irritans in Europe, Oceania, North America and Africa and Echidnophaga gallinaceae from Oceania and Africa. All remaining species were bound to single continents.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.209 | 0.085 |
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".