Worms About Town: a citizen science outreach project discovers microsporidian parasites of nematodes through environmental sampling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Environmental sampling of animal species can be a powerful tool for understanding aspects of host-parasite systems like species diversity and mechanisms of host specificity. To this end, we developed a citizen science project called Worms About Town to survey wild nematodes across Toronto, Ontario for microsporidia infection, which are natural fungal parasites of nematodes. Science communication and learning were emphasized through in-person outreach events and two-way discussion of project findings. Participants were equipped with tailored nematode collection kits to collect rotten plant substrates from local gardens and parks. In the first year of the project (2024), 13 participants acquired 127 samples, 60 of which contained nematodes and four were infected with microsporidia parasites. Microsporidia-infected nematodes were discovered from multiple types of plant substrates from various locations across Toronto. Sequencing of the microsporidia 18S rRNA gene of infected hosts identified two isolates of Nematocida homosporus, which is a known generalist microsporidian parasite of nematodes. The other parasites found in this study are undescribed species belonging to the Pancytospora and Enteropsectra genera, two microsporidia taxa that are distantly related to a clade of human-infecting microsporidia and known to infect wild nematodes. Three nematode isolates of the Caenorhabditis genus were discovered, including two isolates of Caenorhabditis elegans, a species not previously reported in Ontario. Both of the N. homosporus isolates were found in C. elegans, and one can infect a laboratory strain of C. elegans. The Worms About Town project will organize repeated wild nematode collections each year to determine natural factors that impact microsporidia infection in nematodes and to further characterize the diversity of this host-parasite system.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".