Phenotypically plastic responses to environmental variation are more complex than life history theory predicts

For insects that exhibit wing polyphenic development, abiotic and biotic signals dictate the adult wing morphology of the insect in an adaptive manner such that in stressful environments the formation of a flight-capable morph is favored and in low stress environments a flightless morph is favored. While there is a relatively large amount known about the environmental cues that dictate morph formation in wing polyphenic hemipterans like planthoppers and aphids, whether those cues dictate the same morphs in non-hemipteran (i.e. cricket) wing polyphenic species has not been explicitly investigated. To experimentally test the generality of environmental cue determination of wing polyphenism across taxa with diverse life histories, in this study we tested the importance of food quantity, parasitic infection, and tactile cues on wing morph determination in the wing polyphenic sand field cricket, Gryllus firmus. Our results also show that certain stress cues, such as severe diet quantity limi..., Cricket populations and rearing
We used G. firmus crickets from two laboratory populations originally collected from Gainesville, Florida. These colonies have been artificially selected for >40 generations by Dr. Anthony Zera to produce lines with increased production of either the flight-capable long-wing (LW) morph or the flight-incapable short-wing (SW) morph. Although these lines were selected for increased long-wing and short-wing morph formation, they still exhibit phenotypic plasticity for morph (i.e. the colony selected for long-wing can still produce short-winged adults). Additionally, we derived an unselected population from G. firmus collected from Tamarac, Florida in 2019. Because of the different origins of the individuals, we refer to these three separate lines using the following abbreviations: Selected Long-Wing (S–LW), Selected Short-Wing (S–SW), and Unselected (US). However, it is important to note that we were most interested in the question of the degree of influe..., , # Phenotypically plastic responses to environmental variation are more complex than life history theory predicts

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2v6wwpzw2](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2v6wwpzw2)

We have submitted the ontogenetic morphometric data under “Corrected DFA data\" as well as the raw data on the mass and morph outcome for three different environmental cue experiments under the file names “Food Quant”, “Density”, and “Infect” which correspond to the cues of food quantity, simulated density, and parasite infection respectively.

## Description of the data and file structure

Ontogenetic morphometric data (“Corrected DFA data”):

Group: wing morph outcome x sex (SW F, LW F, SW M, LW M) wherein SW = Short-winged population, LW = Long-winged population, M= males and F= females

Sex: M = male, F= female

Morph: wing length at adult eclosion, LW= long-winged, SW = short-winged

Instar: this refers to the terminal instar series as described in the text wherein T= terminal instar (dir...