Data from: Evolution of wing shape in hornets: why is the wing venation efficient for species identification?

Wing venation has long been used for insect identification. Lately, the characterization of venation shape using geometric morphometrics has further improved the potential of using the wing for insect identification. However, external factors inducing variation in wing shape could obscure specific differences, preventing accurate discrimination of species in heterogeneous samples. Here, we show that interspecific difference is the main source of wing shape variation within social wasps. We found that a naive clustering of wing shape data from taxonomically and geographically heterogeneous samples of workers returned groups congruent with species. We also confirmed that individuals can be reliably attributed to their genus, species and populations on the basis of their wing shape. Our results suggested that the shape variation reflects the evolutionary history with a potential influence of other factors such as body shape, climate and mimicry selective pressures. However, the high dimensionality of wing shape variation may have prevented absolute convergences between the different species. Wing venation shape is thus a taxonomically relevant marker combining the accuracy of quantitative characters with the specificity required for identification criteria. This marker may also highlight adaptive processes that could help understand the wing's influence on insect flight.Data-specimens-Perrard-etal-2014-JEBTable of data of the specimens measured for the wing shape. This table mention the name of the specimens, identifications, countries where the specimens have been collected and institutions where the specimens are in collection.Wings-coordinates-Perrard-etal-2014-JEBRaw coordinates of the 19 landmarks used to measured the right forewing of the 1025 specimens.Wings-landmark-coordinates-Perrard-etal-2014-JEB.txtScript-R-Perrard-etal-2014-JEBScript R used to perform the analyses in Perrard et al. 2014, Evolution of wing shape in hornets: why is the wing venation efficient for species identification?Mtree-functions-for-R-phylogenetic-signalR functions to compute the phylogenetic signal according to the method described in Klingenberg & Gidaszewski 2010. The functions include an exact computation of the ancestral states minimizing the squared parsimony (according to the algorithm of McArdle & Rodrigo, 1994), a mapping of the phylogenetic tree in a plot of the morphospace and different methods to test that the phylogeny is significantly shorter than a random tree connecting the terminals in the morphospace