A simple developmental model recapitulates complex insect wing venation patterns

Jordan Hoffmann, Seth Donoughe, Kathy Li, Mary K. Salcedo, Chris H Rycroft

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Wing Segmentation and Circularity Optimization Code Code Written By Jordan Hoffmann, Seth Donoughe, Kathy Li

Contents

All code used in the manuscript is available upon request. Here we provide basic code that segments and runs out routine on an example wing.

Segment Wing Image -Code and example wing used to segment wings in the manuscript. Optimization -Code used to perform area-weighted circularity optimization

Wing Segmentation Citations

Garrison, R. W., Ellenrieder, von, N. and Louton, J. A. (2006). Dragonfly genera of the New World : an illustrated and annotated key to the Anisoptera. Baltimore, MD: JHU Press.

Garrison, R. W., Ellenrieder, von, N. and Louton, J. A. (2010). Damselfly genera of the New World : an illustrated and annotated key to the Zygoptera. Baltimore, MD: JHU Press.

Needham, J. G., Westfall, M. J. and May, M. L. (2014). Dragonflies of North America : the Odonata (Anisoptera) fauna of Canada, the continental United States, northern Mexico and the Greater Antilles. Third edition. Gainesville, FL: Scientific Publishers.

Westfall, M. J. and May, M. L. (1996). Damselflies of North America. Scientific Publishers Gainesville.

Code Requirements

All Python Code Python v 2.7
Anaconda makes installing all packages easy.
All Mathematica code works in Mathematica 10 and 11
Dependencies:
	numy, scipy, Pillow, matplotlib
	scikit-fmm [https://github.com/scikit-fmm/scikit-fmm]
	scikit-image [http://scikit-image.org/]
Installation of dependencies on clean Ubuntu build
	pip install numpy
	pip install scipy
	pip install Pillow
	pip install matplotlib
	pip install scikit-fmm
	pip install scikit-image
Code can be easily parallelized to run on many wing images simultaneously using
	mpi4py
	glob

Video of Optimization Routine

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNW66Iuc-VI

Running the code

Once dependencies installed:

cd Segment_Wing_Image
python generate_seeds_and_velocity.py
python segment.py
python mask_image.py
cd ..

Open Mathematica Notebook for Polygonization and Optimization routines.

Manuscript Information

Here is a great twitter thread from Seth Donoughe: https://twitter.com/seth_donoughe/status/1041802508585394177 Below, I reproduce some of the highlights. Dragonfly wings show a large selection of interesting geometric shapes. Simple models, like Voronoi cells, do not accurately capture observed shapes. We amassed a dataset of ~500 dragonfly and damselfly wings and performed a thorough analysis and segmentation of the geometric patterns. Code and data provided. From this data, we hypothesized a developmental model where repulsive centers equilibrate on a developing wing. Below, I show a real wing and a wing generated by our model. This is an image we provided for a ScienceNews article. We find that this model is able to capture some motifs from other insects as well!

Here is an article from the Harvard SEAS news office: https://www.seas.harvard.edu/content/lord-of-wings