Lipid provisioning in the eggs of an extreme dietary generalist

Sellers, Emma 1 ; Hicks, Kailey1; Tanino-Springsteen, Mykaela1; Vidal, Mayra2; Murphy, Shannon 1

Research facility: University of Denver

Published Nov 03, 2025 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.brv15dvmq

Data files

Nov 03, 2025 version files 47.27 KB

README.md

2.36 KB
Sellers_Lipids.xlsx

44.91 KB

Abstract

Parents can provide care to their offspring to increase their offspring’s chance of survival. There are various types of parental care across insect taxa, one of which is maternal investment. Lipids, the most energy-dense of macronutrients, are considered a good estimate of maternal investment in insects. However, it is not clear how different environments, such as host plants, can impact provisioning, especially for dietary generalists that feed on an array of plant species with varying quality. Using an extreme dietary generalist, fall webworm (FW, Hyphantria cunea), we investigated if females provision different amounts of lipids into their eggs depending on the diet they fed upon as larvae. We measured the lipid content of FW egg clusters from parents reared on seven host plant species of varying quality. We found that parental host plants influenced egg provisioning, such that provisioning depends on host plant but also increases most for parents reared on low-quality diets. Additionally, we found that female parents with heavier pupal mass produced egg clusters with greater lipids per egg. Our results provide evidence that egg provisioning can depend on the parental environment and suggest that the use of low-quality host plants by generalist herbivores may be partially overcome via maternal investment.

Dataset DOI: 10.5061/dryad.brv15dvmq

Description of the data and file structure

Here we test if fall webworm webworm (Hyphantria cunea; hereafter FW) parents provision different amounts of lipids in their egg clusters depending on their larval diet or the the condition of the female, in the form of pupal mass. Each replicate represents a FW egg cluster for which we measured lipid content.

Files and variables

File: Sellers_Lipids.xlsx

Description: Sellers_Lipids.xlsx is the complete data file of all egg clusters we sampled

Variables

egg_clust : egg cluster individual ID number
23_log : ID for female pupal mass for females reared the summer of 2023

some replicates have "NA" for 23_log because the associated egg cluster's female parent was not weighed the summer of 2023
mat_pm : weight of maternal/female pupal mass (mg)

some replicates have "NA" for mat_pm because they do not have an associated maternal pupal mass
p_diet : parental diet treatment, either AP, AL, CA, CC, BW, BL, or NL

AP = domestic apple, Malus domestica; AL = thinleaf alder, Alnus tenuifolia; CA = crab apple, Malus sylvestris; CC = chokecherry, Prunus virginiana; BW = willow, Salix spp., likely Salix fragilis; BL = broadleaf cottonwood, Populus deltoides; NL = narrowleaf cottonwood, Populus angustifolia
lay_date : date eggs were laid
w_date : date eggs were weighed
n_eggs : number of eggs in the egg cluster
initial_m : initial mass of egg cluster before drying (mg)
dry_m : dry mass of egg cluster after 3 days in drying oven (mg)
final_m : final mass of egg cluster after removing lipids (mg)
lipid_mass : mass of lipids in egg cluster, calculated by subtracting final mass from dry mass (mg)
avg_inmegg : mean initial mass per egg in the cluster (mg)
avg_lipmegg : mean lipid mass per egg in the cluster (mg/egg)
egg_age : age of eggs when entered into experiment, or weigh data minus lay date (days)

Code/software

We used R Studio environment to analyze our data, version R.4.4.3. We used the following packages: tidyverse, stats, ggplot2, emmeans, dplyr

For access to script, please contact the corresponding author