What do biologists do in winter when all their study organisms are inactive and invisible? A grad student at Case Western Reserve pondered something he’d heard about the blue dasher dragonfly and figured out how to use iNaturalist submitted data* to turn that anecdote into research.
Michael [Moore] heard that males in the eastern part of the continent had darker wings than those on the western side. “I kind of filed that anecdote away in the back of my brain while I used the species for research in other topics,” he recalls. “But in the winter of 2016-2017, while I waited for the snow to clear so I could get back out there and do some research, I realized that the reason this dragonfly species has different wing color patterns in different parts of North America might be really interesting and worth investigating.”
He began by looking at iNaturalist and discovered 13,500 blue dasher observations, many associated with high-quality images.
Once I started looking through these pictures, I realized that the information that iNaturalist stores was literally everything I needed not just to get some preliminary data, but to decisively address where the dragonfly tended to get the color on its wings and where it did not....After seeing that pattern from the iNaturalist photos, there was no question that I was on to something. I applied for a bunch of small grants for experiments on how I would follow up on this exciting geographic pattern, and I got enough funding from the American Museum of Natural History and my department that I could do the experiments.
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Moore and his colleagues examined the photos for range and wing coloration and then obtained male specimens to test in the lab to learn how wing color affects the dragonfly’s body temperature. Does a higher temp lead to better flying ability? How do wing color and temp influence the ability for males to defend territory? He also examined the iNat data to see if wing coloration is reduced in the warmer portions of the animal’s range.
They found that greater wing color results in higher body temps and this does improve flight performance in cool areas, but decreases performance under warmer conditions. Once the dragonfly’s body temp was too high, the males were less able to defend their territories and mate with females.
Moore acknowledges that this study was possible due to the abundance and quality of citizen science data. Blue dashers are so well represented because they are wide spread, easily noticed, and charismatic.
While gathering natural-history observations is a key element of biological research, it would take years for a small team of researchers to collect that many observations. This can really jumpstart the process of identifying patterns and figuring out which ones are worth designing experiments to understand at a deeper level … as more and more researchers start working with these great platforms, I really think we could witness an explosion of newly uncovered patterns in global biodiversity …
...Because we are now accumulating this remarkable collection of time-stamped photographs of every manner of plant, animal, and fungi through iNaturalist and similar platforms, we're potentially going to have a digitized record of how each of these organisms evolve over the next few decades. We'll be able to watch evolution occurring on a grand scale. From a purely academic perspective, it's every evolutionary biologists dream.
For people observing nature at home, the message inherent in this story is to submit observations and photos. Don’t think your observations are unimportant just because they report common species you know are well documented. Also, report weeds. When scientists discover new noxious weed occurrences through citizen science data, they are able to begin eradication efforts before the weeds thoroughly establish.
Each bit of data you submit combines into a larger story. Someone might be waiting out their winter research hiatus thinking “I wonder . . . . “ and your story piece fills a gap in the puzzle.
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*Here are the data used in the study and an abstract for the published research.
