Ecomorphology of insect ovipositors

The ovipositor is one of the key innovations that helped insects colonize the Earth. The functional specialization of the ovipositor and new egg-laying strategies allow insects to benefit from exploring new oviposition sites. In this chapter, following the introduction of general terminology, we broadly overview the basic ovipositor designs across insect orders, summarizing structural, functional and ecological peculiarities. We also review the methodologies used to study ovipositor functions and highlight the gaps in knowledge on this topic. We conclude by demonstrating some examples of convergences and parallelisms in ovipositor morphologies and revising methodological approaches that experimenters have used. The review discovers that very little is known about the functional morphology of the insect ovipositor and many insect groups are still largely neglected by the scientists working on the ecomorphology of insect ovipositors.