Abstract
ABSTRACTFirst Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Opens, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Mary Salcedo is first author on ‘Computational analysis of size, shape and structure of insect wings’, published in BiO. Mary conducted the research described in this article while a Graduate Student in L. Mahadevan's lab at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA. She is now a NSF Postdoctoral Researcher in Biology in the lab of Jake Socha at Virginia Tech, USA, investigating insect wing shapes, venation patterns and circulation within the wings.
Highlights
“We are one of the first to put all of these wings from many different species on the same geometric space.”
Some of our findings may seem obvious, for example, we found that large shapes take up more wing space, and that wings with lots of venation will have many small, circular shapes. This method and the measurements we made are from a broad sweep of hundreds of insect wings, and we are one of the first to put all of these wings from many different species on the same geometric space
What are the potential implications of these results for your field of research? We have barely scratched the surface of insect wing diversity
Summary
“We are one of the first to put all of these wings from many different species on the same geometric space.”. We measured all of the shapes within a wing (domains) and asked (1) how circular are these shapes and (2) how much space do they take up in a wing? With all these measurements, we made simple spaces of shape relationships (we called them morphospaces), which are just representations of all our wing measurements.
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