Development of a semi-automatic method for measuring the body lengths of adult weevils

Abstract

For an insect species or an insect group, the body size is considered as one of the important characters. Especially, body length is a typical indicator of body size that is little affected by the sample preparation. Measuring the body length of insect by the conventional method, however, takes a lot of effort and time. Accordingly, it is hard to collect enough data to examine the size distribution thoroughly. Here, we developed a semi-automatic method for measuring the body lengths of weevils using techniques of image analysis. This method dramatically shortened the time to measure the distribution of the body lengths of weevils. In addition, we demonstrated that it was easily possible to collect enough data to examine the shape of the distribution in detail, such as asymmetry, by the method.