Have you ever wondered why bugs are the colors they are? From the bright hues of butterflies to the earthy tones of ants, these natural colors serve many important roles. These roles include attracting mates, warding off predators, and staying warm.
In dragonflies, a 300-million-year-old group intimately connected to freshwater ecosystems on Earth, the uses of their vibrant body colors are almost entirely unknown. This is because of an unfortunate problem – color fade. We would normally turn to specimens in museum collections for data on the colors of species, but because their pigments naturally degrade over time their vivid colors disappear in weeks to months.
For this reason we turn to iNaturalist, a citizen science platform where users upload photo observations of organisms. Since it contains photos of live organisms, color fade is no issue. But it also presents many challenges because of how incredibly variable these images can be. Think of all the different viewing angles, lighting conditions, and cameras that many thousands of observers use across the 2 million dragonfly images on iNaturalist. All of these affect the color we see.
We have developed an approach that uses computer vision and AI to deal with these issues. We are able to pull the dragonfly out of each image, filter bad or weird ones out, then discover what colors are present. This data will allow us to finally answer questions about the colors of the 2000 dragonfly species on iNaturalist globally. For example we think that dark body colors might be used to help warm dragonflies in cold environments, and that vibrant patterns are used for species recognition during mating.
An essential part of trying a new method in science is you make sure it works. Our approach to getting color data is really complex and novel, and we want to compare it to the common standard of having human observers code colors – and for that we need your help! If the colors you choose for an image match up to what our computational approach detects for that same image, we’re golden. Otherwise, I have more work to do!
Thanks for considering joining the Big Dragonfly Color team!
Link to our expedition:
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/md68135/notes-from-nature-labs
Be sure to choose “Big Dragonfly Color” on the right side of the page!
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