CICIMA

This is a multidisciplinary project, where researchers from biology, physics and statistics are working to answer the same question: are the colors from small wasps different?

This question is very important from the biology point of view, since it can define different and new taxonomy, but it can also shed a light on new hypothesis about predator’s behavoir, and also on how to characterize genera.

From the physics point of view, the use of the microspectrophotometer can change the way that the structure of an insect is characterized, but most importantly, how this structure defines the color.

In statistics, a relatively new area of research is dedicated to study observations that can be seen as curves instead of points. Functional data analysis (FDA) can be used to analyzed microspectrophotometer data and help to statistically test if there are difference between colors that are not visible to the human eye. Also, it is important to compare the FDA results with the other statistical methods that were using before to characterize color in insects.

This project was created to address all the mentioned questions from the biological, physical and statistical point of view, to have a more robust response to the question: are the colors from small wasps different?