Summer Insect Pandemics in the United States
Summer Insect Pandemics in the United States
Using the crowd-sourced data of iNaturalist.org, it is possible to get an idea of what life forms can be observed, when and where [1]. Many arthropod insect orders—Coleoptera, Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera, Odanata and Orthoptera—include species that lie dormant during the winter months and emerge briefly as adults in the summer [2–10]. For example, the swallowtails of genus Papilio have two to three broods per year, and their observational data in the United States features a strong logistic peak centered roughly around August 1 [2]. Logistic peaks have an extremely simple mathematical definition (see Details). They appear in observational data across the class Insecta, and in even more generality. Some of the available COVID-19 pandemic data also closely follows a logistic peak [11, 12]. This Demonstration shows how to use a special logistic peak as a data model and extract comparable fit parameters in a wide variety of cases.