Host specificity, prevalence and intensity of infestation of fleas (Order Siphonaptera) of small mammals at selected sites in the city of Windhoek, Namibia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Small mammals host diverse communities of parasites including fleas. There is considerable \nresearch interest in effects of parasites on their hosts. Host specificity, prevalence and intensity \nof infestation of fleas on small mammals were studied at selected sites in the city of Windhoek, \nNamibia from April to July 2005. Small mammals were live-trapped using Sherman traps and \nautopsied before collection of fleas. Fleas were processed using standard parasitological procedures \nand were mounted permanently onto slides using Canada balsam. Small mammal hosts \nand fleas were identified to species level. A total of sixty one (61) small mammals belonging to \nfour rodent species, i.e. bushveld gerbil Gerbilliscus leucogaster, hairy-footed gerbil Gerbillurus \npaeba, black-tailed tree rat Thallomys nigricauda and the four-stripped mouse Rhabdomys \npumilio and one insectivore, bushveld sengi Elephantulus intufi, were captured. One hundred and \nthirty six (136) fleas belonging to eight species, i.e. Xenopsylla brasiliensis, Xenopsylla cheopis, \nXenopsylla hirsuta, Xenopsylla trispinis, Dinopsyllus ellobius, Dinopsyllus zuluensis, Epirimia \naganipes and Listropsylla aricinae were collected from infested hosts. Dinopsyllus ellobius and \nX. trispinis and L. aricinae were host specific, being collected only from G. leucogaster and G. \npaeba, respectively. No fleas were collected from E. intifi and R. pumilio. The prevalence of \nfleas ranged from zero in E. entufi and R. pumilio through 50 % in T. nigricauda, 55.1% in G. \nleucogaster to 61.1% in G. paeba. High species richness of fleas was recorded in G. leucogaster \n(seven out of eight flea species) and in G. paeba (six out of eight flea species). The overall \nprevalence of fleas was higher in male (54.3%) than in female (34.6%) hosts. There was no \nassociation between the body mass of small mammal hosts and the intensity of flea infestation. \nThe intensity of infestation of fleas did not vary significantly by host species and sex of hosts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".