Importance of Life Stage Capture in Dragonfly Specimen Digitization

Life stage is apparently rarely captured during the digitization of natural history collections, but it can highlight sampling biases, life history changes, and gaps in taxonomy and systematics. Through the digitization of non-adult specimens of clubtail dragonflies, for example, it is possible to identify the taxa that lack diagnostic keys for all life stages. While likely only a small proportion of an entomological collection includes all life stages for a single taxon, the larvae and exuviae (the skin shed upon emergence from the aquatic larval stage to the adult terrestrial stage) can provide a more comprehensive representation of morphological characters for species’ identification and evolutionary questions. Furthermore, recording the life stage of dragonflies in the digitization process enables analysis of the distribution of a dragonfly taxon throughout its life history, which is both aquatic and terrestrial. By digitizing the Gomphidae specimens in collection at the Frost Entomological Museum at Penn State University, proportions of life stages were compared to other digitized collections. This analysis reveals gaps in both keys and collections, as well as the need for increased diagnostic and natural history data for this family.