Data from: A dataset of egg size and shape from more than 6,700 insect species

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 database 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 database 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 database to the currently accepted scientific names in
taxonomic and genetic databases, which will facilitate the use of this
data for testing the pressing evolutionary hypotheses in offspring size
evolution.