Abstract
Offspring size is a fundamental trait in disparate biological fields of study. This trait can be measured as the size of plant seeds, animal eggs, or live young, and it influences ecological interactions, organism fitness, maternal investment, and embryonic development. Although multiple evolutionary processes have been predicted to drive the evolution of offspring size, the phylogenetic distribution of this trait remains poorly understood, due to the difficulty of reliably collecting and comparing offspring size data from many species. Here we present a dataset of 10,449 morphological descriptions of insect eggs, with records for 6,706 unique insect species and representatives from every extant hexapod order. The dataset includes eggs whose volumes span more than eight orders of magnitude. We created this dataset by partially automating the extraction of egg traits from the primary literature. In the process, we overcame challenges associated with large-scale phenotyping by designing and employing custom bioinformatic solutions to common problems. We matched the taxa in this dataset to the currently accepted scientific names in taxonomic and genetic databases, which will facilitate the use of these data for testing pressing evolutionary hypotheses in offspring size evolution.
Highlights
Background & SummaryThe size of a reproductive propagule, for example an animal egg or a plant seed, has crucial implications for the biology of both the parent and the offspring[1,2,3]
Insect eggs come in an incredible diversity of shapes and sizes[7,8]
All data were collected from published records, including both measurements reported in text descriptions of insect eggs, as well as our own new measurements of published images
Summary
The size of a reproductive propagule, for example an animal egg or a plant seed, has crucial implications for the biology of both the parent and the offspring[1,2,3]. Without a comparison of egg sizes across insects, we cannot ascertain basic information such as the extant range of insect egg sizes, or the relationship between size and ecology or development To address this problem, we created a dataset of quantitative parameters describing egg morphology from the entomological literature[9]. We assessed the variation in the precision used to record data for all dataset entries This provides the necessary information to account for sources of variation in a comparative study of insect egg morphology. One way to overcome this barrier is to rely on the thousands of data points already reported by experts in the scientific literature This method brings its own challenges, such as assigning concordance between taxonomic names and extracting data from published text or images[13]. Both the egg dataset and the software solutions used to generate it will have broad value for researchers interested in studying questions of morphological evolution across large evolutionary scales
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