A critique of the dragonfly delusion hypothesis: why sampling exuviae does not avoid bias

摘要

A recent study comparing adult and exuvial odonate richness concluded that adult surveys overestimate the number of species reproducing successfully. The authors called this phenomenon the ‘‘dragony delusion’’ and recommended that only exuviae be used for biomonitoring and habitat quality assessment. However, they drew this conclusion from limited surveys and detectionna¨ve analysis and failed to acknowledge that exuvial richness is typically biased low.