First record of the genus Xestophanes Förster, 1869 (Hymenoptera: Cynipidae) in northern Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The family Cynipidae *sensu lato* (Hymenoptera) are ~1,700 species of gall-inducing and gall-usurping wasps or inquilines (Buffington et al 2020). Historically, taxonomists assumed there was single origin of inquilinism within the gall wasps, partially due to the assumed morphological synapomorphy of the syntergite, a fusion of tergites 2 + 3 in adult females; but their evolutionary history was proven to be much more complex in contemporary molecular phylogenetic analyses (Ronquist et al. 2015). One taxon that threw a wrench in this scheme is the genus *Xestophanes* Förster, 1869, a gall inducer on herbaceous cinquefoils (Rosaceae: *Potentilla* L.); this genus has a syntergite, despite being a primary gall inducer. The three species of *Xestophanes* are members of the tribe Diastrophini, a lineage of both gall inducers and inquilines associated with the plant family Rosaceae (Melika 2006). Ronquist et al. (2015) recovered *Xestophanes* as sister to the inquilinous genus *Synophromorpha* Ashmead, which together are sister to the gall-inducing *Diastrophus* Hartig. As a result, understanding the biology and evolution of this genus is especially significant in revealing the number of transitions between inquilinism and gall induction in the Diastrophini. *Xestophanes* is widespread throughout Europe, ranging from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, with *X. potentillae* Retzius being widespread, *X. brevitarsis* Thomson being uncommon, and *X. caspianus* Liu being known only from its type series. Here, we report the first record of *Xestophanes*, and the Diastrophini, in Northern Africa in Ourigane, Morocco based on a specimen discovered in the ethanol collection of the Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids, and Nematodes.
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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) | 0.002 | 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".