Figure 1.

Leg morphology (‘leg geometry’) across Gerridae, and body length and mass of the study species. (A) Body length and leg proportions across Gerridae [45]. (B) Body mass and leg proportions of studied species. (C) Silhouettes of three species at the same scale. Leg morphology is expressed as proportions of wetted forelegs in the total wetted length of six legs of an individual water strider (‘wetted leg geometry’). Species with ‘intermediate-wetted-foreleg geometry’: Aquarius paludum, A. remigis, Gerris gracilicornis and G. latiabdominis. Leg geometry of A. paludum (green triangles) was used as the representative of ‘intermediate-wetted-foreleg geometry’ (approx. 4–8%), Ptilomera tigrina served as the representative of ‘long-wetted-foreleg geometry’ (approx. 12–14%) and Gigantometra gigas served as representative of the ‘short-wetted-foreleg geometry’ (approx. 1–3%) in the model. For more explanations and data, see captions to electronic supplementary material, figures S1–S5.