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Dryad

Parental effects in Fall webworm

Sellers, Emma1; Tanino-Springsteen, Mykaela1; Vidal, Mayra2; Vyas, Dhaval1; Wimp, Gina3; Abarca, Mariana4; Comerford, Mattheau2; Murphy, Shannon1

Published Jun 22, 2026 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.j3tx95xr0

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Abstract

The environment or experiences of a parent generation can impact the fitness of the next generation, a phenomenon known as parental effects. While a high-quality diet can directly benefit an individual and a low-quality diet can reduce fitness, a parental effect occurs only when there is a transgenerational response to these stimuli that manifests in the individual’s offspring. In dietary generalists, a parental effect could play an important role for offspring performance if the species experiences considerable variation in quality across host plants; positive parental effects may result from host matching between parents and offspring on high-quality host plants, whereas negative effects may result from host matching on low-quality host plants or parent-offspring host mis-matching. A lack of strong parental effects across host plants may also help explain the maintenance of dietary generalism for generalist herbivores. We investigated whether parental effects occur in the generalist herbivore fall webworm by testing whether offspring performance depended on the host plant on which the parental generation was reared. We found that parental effects do exist, but play a limited role for FW and depend on both the larval and parental host plant. Our study provides insight into the transgenerational effects of diet in FW and the potential fitness implications when parental and offspring generations experience the same environment (parent-offspring host matching) or different environments (parent-offspring host mismatching). Parent-offspring host matching only improved offspring performance on the highest quality host plant, and the negative effects of host mis-matching were limited and inconsistent across host plants. Thus, our study suggests that parental effects can affect offspring fitness in fall webworm, but a lack of strong, consistent patterns may help explain the maintenance of dietary generalism in an extreme generalist herbivore.