Modern Morphometrics of Medically Important Arthropods

Abstract:

This chapter discusses about the metric variation among and within natural populations of medically important arthropods. It does not focus on developmental mechanisms or genetic material encoding the body traits. Whatever these mechanisms or materials could be, they vary among individuals, populations, or species, and when they vary, some metric properties also vary. Geometric morphometrics detects them, nicely disclosing patterns otherwise hidden to the observer.For medically important insects, specific needs are those related to vector-control strategy and arthropod characterization. What would happen if one population is treated without treating a neighbor one? What could be the source of a reinfestation: survivor individuals or immigrants? How to separate cryptic species without depending on genetic markers? or without being an expert in entomology? To answer these specific questions, I recommend the use of shape as opposed to size. Geometric shape, in addition to allowing clear visualization of metric changes, has less environmental variance than size. As such, it becomes the character of choice to address questions related to species identification and natural populations tracking.

Año de publicación:

2017

Keywords:

• Size
• Reinfestation
• Biodiversity
• Species identification
• Bank of reference images
• shape

Fuente:

scopus