Biogeographical Patterns in Oak Gall Wasp-Parasitoid Communities Associated with Oregon White Oak, Quercus Garryana, Under Anthropogenic Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Species are expanding their ranges poleward as a consequence of global climate change. However, natural enemies may lag behind range-expanding hosts, facilitating “ecological release.” A species that has experienced a recent poleward range expansion is Neuroterus saltatorius, an oak gall wasp (Hymenoptera: Cynipidae) that expanded its range from mainland western North America to Vancouver Island, BC. In its expanded range, it is threatening oak savanna ecosystems. This species induces gall structures on its host plant, Quercus garryana. Parasitoid wasps are attracted to galls and feed on developing insects in galls, acting as population control agents. We examine how interactions with enemies and competitors change over the range of Q. garryana and in the native and expanded range of N. saltatorius, and if changes in interactions relate to ecological release. Parasitoid wasps were reared from cynipid species collected from Q. garryana at 18 sites from Northern California to Vancouver Island, BC and identified to morphospecies using taxonomic keys. We found 21 cynipid morphospecies that co-occur with N. saltatorius on Q. garryana throughout its range, with a subset of cynipids (9 morphospecies) in the expanded range. We have identified 16 species of parasitoids from N. saltatorius. Preliminary results suggest a different composition of parasitoid enemies in its expanded range compared to its native range. This is likely due to a change in the composition of known generalist parasitoids that attack the range-expanding host that may not be effectively switching other from other competitors, rather than from a loss of known specialist parasitoids. We have also identified parasitoid morphospecies from a co-occurring competitor cynipid, Andricus quercuscalifornicus, and found no overlap in parasitoids with N. saltatorius. This suggests that A. quercuscalifornicus is not a competitor and does not contribute to the release of N. saltatorius. Uncovering how species interactions with range-expanding hosts are altered is important to predict outcomes of anthropogenic range expansions.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".