In December 2015, Seth Donoughe and Sam Church invited me to chat about an insect egg size project they were just starting. We talked about their ideas on assembling a very large dataset of insect eggs and how we could build and use a phylogeny to study their evolution. Fast-forward 3.5 years and that ideia become two beautiful papers that were just published today. It was really fun to work with them and Cassandra Extavour to discover all the craziness of insect eggs. As most entomologists, before we started I paid much less attention to the egg life stage than it deserves. I hope that now that this dataset is available people will appreciate how diverse insects are in all life stages and the community we will discover much more about insect eggs!
Here is a twitter thread explaining what we did: https://twitter.com/seth_donoughe/status/1146469955380137984
Church SH, Donoughe S, de Medeiros BAS, Extavour CG. 2019. Insect egg size and shape evolve with ecology but not developmental rate. Nature 571:58-62. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1302-4
Church SH, Donoughe S, de Medeiros BAS, Extavour CG. 2019. A dataset of egg size and shape from more than 6,700 insect species. Scientific Data 6:104. DOI: 10.1038/s41597-019-0049-y
Four different insect eggs (a fly, a true bug, a butterfly and a cricket). Images by Seth Donoughe and Sam Church