[Odonata-l] Morphology and niche overlap

[Mike Ferro]

I was thinking about speciation with loose overlap of niches but
strong separation of reproductive morphology and it occurred to me
that dragonflies would be a wonderful group in which to look for this.

Concerning the male genetalia of, say Somatochlora: How much variation
of the male genital morphology exists in a species? How much variation
of the male genital morphology exists among the species in the genus
(it certainly looks like quite a lot in Dragonflies of NA)? I have no
idea how one would go about quantifying the latter.

Basically, would we see male genetalia with clearly defined
(non-overlapping) differences among species, but poorly defined
(overlapping) niches among species of the genus, or vice versa, or
neither?

I guess my idea is that there may be strong pressures from sister
species to keep a certain morphology clearly defined while not so much
pressure on other aspects of the life of the beast.

If anyone has done a study on this, I'd love to hear about it. Any
comments are appreciated.

Cheers,

Mike Ferro
spongymesophyll at gmail.com