Data from: The interactive effects of heat stress, parasitism, and hostplant quality in a host-parasitoid system

Parker, Anna1 ; Kingsolver, Joel2

Published Dec 28, 2023 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.gf1vhhmw8

Data files

Dec 28, 2023 version files 219.84 KB

Abstract

Species interactions are expected to change in myriad ways as the frequency and magnitude of extreme temperature events increase with anthropogenic climate change. The relationships between endosymbionts, parasites, and their hosts are particularly sensitive to thermal stress, which can have cascading effects to other trophic levels. We investigate the interactive effects of heat stress and parasitism on a terrestrial tritrophic system consisting of two hostplants (one common, high-quality plant and one novel, low-quality plant), a caterpillar herbivore, and a specialist parasitoid wasp. We used a fully-factorial experiment to determine the bottom-up effects of the novel hostplant on both the caterpillars’ life history traits and the wasps’ survival, and the top-down effects of parasitism and heat shock on caterpillar developmental outcomes and herbivory levels. Hostplant identity interacted with thermal stress to affect wasp success, with wasps performing better on the low-quality hostplant under constant temperatures but worse under heat shock conditions. Surprisingly, caterpillars consumed less leaf material of the low-quality hostplant to reach the same final mass across developmental outcomes. In parasitized caterpillars, heat shock reduced parasitoid survival and increased both caterpillar final mass and development time on both hostplants. These findings highlight the importance of studying community-level responses to climate change from a holistic and integrative perspective and provide insight into potential substantial interactions between thermal stress and diet quality in plant-insect systems.

README: The interactive effects of heat stress, parasitism, and hostplant quality in a host-parasitoid system

https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.gf1vhhmw8

These data are used to create all of the figures and conduct all of the analyses found in the manuscript. All data were collected and analyzed by the corresponding author (A. Parker).

Description of the data and file structure

MsCcHSFeedJan1MOD.csv

Used to calculate all caterpillar developmental data, wasp success data, and Figs 2-4

Note: All blank values in the dataset reflect developmental stages that that individual did not experience. For example, non-parasitized caterpillars will not have any values under date.para or num.para, since they were never parasitized. Similarly, individuals that did not reach instars beyond 5th will have absent values for date.6th and mass.6th. Individuals that died before the end of the experiment were not massed at time of death, so their date.max and mass.max columns are also empty. The exception is the date.pupa column, where we began recording the exact date of pupation for wandering individuals mid-way through the experiment. This column is not used in any of the analyses, so the missing data do not impact our results.

Column	Explanation	Format	Units
ID	Unique ID for each caterpillar	###	N/A
food	Identifier for the type of food consumed by the caterpillar	Factor	TB (tobacco), DC (devil's claw)
fate	Ending developmental outcome of the individual	Character	dead, em, wander, wowe, wowe mongo ("quink" denotes a different species that was excluded, "wander*" and "?" denote unclear outcomes that were excluded)
date.max	Date at the maximum mass measurement taken of the caterpillar	MM/DD/YYYY	N/A
mass.max	Maximum mass measurement taken of the caterpillar	Numeric	mg
pop	Population where the individual was collected	Character	Clayton, RM (Rocky Mount), MF (Mason Farm)
para	parasitization status	Factor	yes/no
HS	heat shock status	Factor	yes/no
treatment	Combination of pararsitization and heat shock status	Character	NP/P NHS/HS
bin	Identifier of the bin in which the caterpillar was housed	Character	A-Z
bin.type	Whether the bin housed one individual or 4 in dividers	Factor	group or ind
date.death	Date the caterpillar died	MM/DD/YYYY	N/A
survived	binary of whether the caterpillar survived the experiment or not	Factor	yes/no
date.hatch	Date the caterpillar hatched	MM/DD/YYYY	N/A
mass.hatch	Mass at hatching (for future analyses - set to 1 mg)	Numeric	mg
date.3rd	Date the caterpillar molted to 3rd instar	MM/DD/YYYY	N/A
mass.3rd	Mass at 3rd instar	Numeric	mg
date.para	Date the caterpillar was parasitized (if applicable)	MM/DD/YYYY	N/A
num.para	Number of times the caterpillar was parasitized	Numeric	N/A
date.hs	Date the caterpillar was heat shocked (if applicable)	MM/DD/YYYY	N/A
	THEN FOLLOW A LONG SERIES OF CONGRUENT COLUMNS:
date.XXX	Date at particular development stage (instars 4-7 as defined by number of molts, wandering, pupation, eclosion, wasp emergence, etc.)	MM/DD/YYYY	N/A
mass.XXX	Mass at that particular development stage (instars 4-7 as defined by number of molts, wandering, pupation, eclosion, wasp emergence, etc.)	Numeric	mg
	IMPORTANT ONES TO HIGHLIGHT:
sex	Sex of the adult moth	Factor	M/F
deformed	Whether the moth had deformed wings or not	Factor	yes/no
date.coc	Date of wasp cocoon appearance	MM/DD/YYYY	N/A
date.remove	Date of wasp cocoon removal	MM/DD/YYYY	N/A
num.w.larvae	Number of wasp larvae outside of the caterpillar but not within a cocoon	Numeric	N/A
num.w.coc	Number of wasp cocoons	Numeric	N/A
wet	Whether the cup was wet with hemolymph or not	Factor	yes/no
date.w.eclos	Date of wasp eclosion	MM/DD/YYYY	N/A
num.w.eclos	Number of wasps that successfully eclosed	Numeric	N/A
date.out	Date the caterpillar exited the experiment	MM/DD/YYYY	N/A
mass.out	Mass of caterpillar at exit	Numeric	mg
date.cull	Date the caterpillar was removed from the experiment prematurely due to an issue molting, etc. (see notes column for explanation)	MM/DD/YYYY	N/A

MsCcHSFeedLeafScanFinal.csv

Used for calculating leaf area consumed, related analyses, and Fig. 5

Column	Explanation	Format	Units
Caterpillar ID	Unique ID of the caterpillar	Numeric XXX	N/A
Leaf ID	Unique ID of the leaf scanned	Numeric XXXX	N/A
Caterpillar Instar	Instar of the caterpillar at time of scan	Numeric	3-7, w = wandered, para = parasitoid emergence, out = removed after 3 weeks without wasp emergence
Caterpillar Alive	Is the caterpillar alive at time of scan	Factor	yes/no
Date	Date of scan	M/DD/YYYY	N/A
Time	Time of scan (decimal)	Decimal	hour
Leaf Area	Scanned leaf area as calculated by scanner	Numeric	cm^2
Notes	Any notes associated with that scan	Character	N/A
Image	Image address to original scan	Character	N/A

Sharing/Access information

Links to other publicly accessible locations of the data: https://github.com/annaparker5/MsCcHSFeed

Code/Software

The included script runs all the analyses and figure creation for the manuscript. It requires R (v. 4.2.2) and RStudio.