Fecal Egg Counts, Nemabiomes, and Management Practices in Saskatchewan Horses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this thesis was to describe intensity (fecal egg counts, FEC) and diversity (using nemabiome ITS2 metabarcoding approaches) of gastrointestinal nematodes in Saskatchewan horses, their relationships with individual horse variables and management practices, and effectiveness of owner-administered treatments. We conducted fecal surveys in horses in fall 2021 (n=107) and spring 2022 (n=123) that had not been dewormed in the previous 6 months, most of which were adults (greater than 3 years old). Parascaris spp. eggs were rare, more commonly present in spring and in horses less than 3 years old. Strongyle prevalence and mean FEC were significantly higher in fall (76% and 964 eggs per gram of feces, EPG) than spring (66% and 593 EPG), and in pastured vs stabled horses. Age was significantly associated with strongyle FEC, with higher counts in young and old horses, especially older mares. Third stage larvae were cultured from 95 fecal samples containing >200 strongyle EPG, and 34 unique species were identified, including 28 small strongyles (dominated by Cylicocyclus nassatus, Cyathostomum catinatum, and Cylicostephanus longibursatus), 2 large migratory strongyles (Strongylus vulgaris and S. edentatus), 3 non-migratory large strongyles (Triodontophorus spp. and Craterostomum acuticaudatum), and the cattle nematode Ostertagia ostertagi. Nemabiome composition was significantly associated with age, sex, collection season, and FEC. In fall, fecal samples from 5 of 29 horses resampled 14 days after anthelmintic treatment administered by owners harboured strongyle eggs (from 11 to 775 EPG) with a mean treatment effectiveness of 96%; on a single property with 15 horses, mean effectiveness was 92%, excluding a horse that likely missed its dose. Three samples contained 18 small strongyle species before treatment, and seven species after, including the 3 dominant small strongyles. Only 23% of horse owners used FEC to determine need for treatment, 41% automatically dewormed twice per year, 26% relied on appearance of the horse to calculate body weight, 55% used a product containing a macrocyclic lactone, and 39% of owners did not know what product they had most recently used. We report high strongyle FEC and diversity of strongyles for managed domestic horses, and evidence of lack of effectiveness of owner-administered treatments which may in part be related to suboptimal deworming practices as well as emerging resistance of small strongyles.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".