This week, my student and I are presenting some of our iNaturalist-enabled research on large milkweed bugs at the Digital Data Conference. Since (like everything) it’s online, the poster and narration by my student, Tedra Cuddy’s, can be viewed on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs_Ro8pXJHc&feature=youtu.be
We are totally indebted to all the identifiers, observers, and curators here on iNaturalist that made this possible! Our paper is forthcoming, and we’re excited to share all the cool things we’ve found in the data.
Gif of the count of individuals in an image with each frame as a month (you can see signatures of some of their migratory and breeding behavior):
Box plot of the parts of plants occupied by subadults (in the lab its been demonstrated that it’s more challenging for the subadults to feed on the closed pods, since they eat the seeds inside the pods, so the higher the number of subadults on a closed pod the higher their overall survival, so our results fit with prior suspicions about their behavior):
