A STUDY OF CULICOIDES BITING MIDGES IN THE SUBGENUS MONOCULICOIDES: POPULATION GENETICS, TAXONOMY, SYSTEMATICS, AND CONTROL
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Only a small species of Culicoides midges are pathogen vectors in both managed and natural systems, and as such, proper species delimitation is vital. Before this study, the C. variipennis species complex contained three recognized species (only one of which is a vector; C. sonorensis), but limited molecular and morphological differences have hindered surveillance efforts. Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data were generated using ddRAD sequencing for 206 individuals throughout the United States and Canada. Clustering analyses of these SNPs suggested the occurrence of at least two additional species in both sympatric and allopatric populations. The C. variipennis complex belongs to the subgenus C. (Monoculicoides), and here I present morphological, ecological, and molecular evidence in support of the taxonomic arrangement within this group. Two former synonyms were raised to full species status, four species were designated as new synonyms, and two new species were described. Keys to the adults of both sexes, bionomic information, and taxonomic discussions for all 26 species were provided. Despite some ecological overlap between many species of C. (Monoculicoides), only C. sonorensis appears to have any significant role in viral pathogen transmission. Identifying the molecular mechanisms behind the vector competency of this species will undoubtably lead to more options for control strategies. Next-generation control methods such as Wolbachia- and genetic-based population suppression and replacement are being investigated in other vector groups, and here we assess the feasibility and applicability of these approaches for use against biting midges.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".