Starting in summer 2017, a study of smoky rubyspot damselflies was launched through iNaturalist. The goal of this study, run by researchers at UCLA and Durham University (in the U.K.), was to learn more about how wing coloration changes through time and in different locations by recruiting participants to submit their photographs of smoky rubyspots.
Overall, hundreds of ‘citizen scientists’ from across North America submitted a total of more than 600 photographs to the project. So far, the researchers have measured the relative size of male smoky rubyspots’ wingspots from these photographs.
One interesting result from this study is that the amount of dark wing pigment on males varies predictably across space and time. Although the amount of dark pigmentation increases toward the middle of summer in all locations, the maximum extent of pigmentation that males express is drastically different in different parts of the range.
For instance, here is a ...more ↓
Starting in summer 2017, a study of smoky rubyspot damselflies was launched through iNaturalist. The goal of this study, run by researchers at UCLA and Durham University (in the U.K.), was to learn more about how wing coloration changes through time and in different locations by recruiting participants to submit their photographs of smoky rubyspots.
Overall, hundreds of ‘citizen scientists’ from across North America submitted a total of more than 600 photographs to the project. So far, the researchers have measured the relative size of male smoky rubyspots’ wingspots from these photographs.
One interesting result from this study is that the amount of dark wing pigment on males varies predictably across space and time. Although the amount of dark pigmentation increases toward the middle of summer in all locations, the maximum extent of pigmentation that males express is drastically different in different parts of the range.
For instance, here is a photograph of a male from Texas in July:
Compare this to a male on the Pacific Coast of Mexico in July:
And a male from Virginia in July:
We report these results, along with other details, in a scientific manuscript, now published in the journal Ecography, available to view here.
These findings are only the beginning. In the future, we will develop new methods to extract measurements of female wing color (e.g., how light or dark they are), in order to understand how female traits also vary.
To continue building on our analyses, we hope that iNaturalist users, who were an integral part of this project's success, will continue to observe and submit observations of smoky rubyspots throughout their range.
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Smoky Rubyspots
