Life tables in entomology: A discussion on tables’ parameters and the importance of raw data

[en] Life tables are one of the most common tools to describe the biology of insect species and their response to environmental conditions. Although the benefits of life tables are beyond question, we raise some doubts about the completeness of the information reported in life tables. To substantiate these doubts, we consider a case study (Corcyra cephalonica) for which the raw dataset is available. The data suggest that the Gaussian approximation of the development times which is implied by the average and standard error usually reported in life tables does not describe reliably the actual distribution of the data which can be misleading and hide interesting biological aspects. Furthermore, it can be risky when life table data are used to build models to predict the demographic changes of the population. The present study highlights this aspect by comparing the impulse response generated by the raw data and by its Gaussian approximation based on the mean and the standard error. The conclusions of this paper highlight: i) the importance of adding more information to life tables and, ii) the role of raw data to ensure the completeness of this kind of studies. Given the importance of raw data, we also point out the need for further developments of a standard in the community for sharing and analysing data of life tables experiments. © 2024 Rossini et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Disciplines :

Entomology & pest control

Author, co-author :

Rossini, Luca; Service d’Automatique et d’Analyse des Systèmes, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

Contarini, Mario; Dipartimento di Scienze Agrarie e Forestali, Università degli Studi della Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy

Speranza, Stefano; Dipartimento di Scienze Agrarie e Forestali, Università degli Studi della Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy ; Centro de Estudios Parasitológicos y de Vectores CEPAVE, CONICET, UNLP, La Plata, Argentina

Mermer, Serhan; Department of Horticulture, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, United States ; Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, United States

Walton, Vaughn; Department of Horticulture, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, United States

Francis, Frédéric ; Université de Liège - ULiège > TERRA Research Centre > Gestion durable des bio-agresseurs

Garone, Emanuele; Service d’Automatique et d’Analyse des Systèmes, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

Language :

English

Title :

Life tables in entomology: A discussion on tables’ parameters and the importance of raw data

Publication date :

07 March 2024

Journal title :

PLoS ONE

eISSN :

1932-6203

Publisher :

Public Library of Science

Volume :

Issue :

3 March

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Available on ORBi :

since 30 January 2025

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