Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Outlines of wings from 127 species of North American mosquitoes were digitized. Comparisons were made among several different methods of reducing the information in the resulting coordinates to a series of descriptors that could be used in multivariate analysis. Methods included Fourier analysis of both radii and tangent angle change functions. In addition, the relatively new method of elliptic Fourier analysis was tried. Cluster and ordination analyses based on the various sets of descriptors summarized well the pattern of similarities and differences in wing shapes, but clusters of similar wings do not agree well with traditional taxonomic groupings. The use of elliptic Fourier descriptors appears to be especially promising for future work.
Rohlf et al. (Sat,) studied this question.