Morphological characters from sabethine mosquitoes were coded from lar
vae, pupae and adults, and life-stage partitions were evaluated to det
ermine the contribution of each to the topology of a combined cladogra
m. Initial tests failed to find congruence between characters partitio
ned by life stage. However, when components from the combined analysis
were tested using reduced taxon sets, a high degree of concordance be
tween partitions was observed. A procedure for assessing individual li
fe-stage contribution is employed, in which exhaustive searches are us
ed to explore all possible arrangements for each of the selected compo
nents. Seven of the 10 components examined were able to recover the co
mbined topology with a reduced taxon set. Congruent arrangements of ta
xa were typically observed for two or more life stages, although parti
tioned data were less resolved and frequently included aberrant topolo
gies (those not supported by other partitioned or combined reduced tax
on tree sets). In addition, none of the partitioned data sets gave rob
ust results for all tests, suggesting that studies which emphasize cha
racter data from single life stages may support misleading arrangement
s of taxa. One component on the combined cladogram was not supported b
y any of the life-stage partitions when analysed separately. These res
ults are complementary to ''total evidence'' approach, and demonstrate
that partitions of data are useful for examining suits of characters
which may cause some components of the ''total evidence'' tree to appe
ar unstable. (C) 1998 The Willi Hennig Society.