Dietary constraints and costs of melanin pigmentation plasticity

Understanding the evolution of adaptive plasticity requires considering the costs of producing a plastic trait. We test the hypothesis that diet can act as a constraint on melanin pigmentation and lead to costly resource allocation trade-offs in Hyles lineata, the white-lined sphinx moth. In a diet manipulation experiment, we found that two aspects of melanin pigmentation, percent melanic area and darkness, are relatively robust in the face of diet variation in environments where they are prioritized. Next, we tested whether larval melanin pigmentation is involved in resource allocation trade-offs with traits sharing the same dietary precursors: larval immune response, adult flight muscle mass, and adult wing pigmentation. Larval pigmentation trades off with both immunity and adult pigmentation. Contrary to many patterns reported in the literature, these trade-offs existed on the high resource diet, but not the low resource diet, indicating that certain traits may have a minimum thresho..., , # Dietary constraints and costs of melanin pigmentation plasticity

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.fbg79cp74](10.5061/dryad.fbg79cp74)

## Description of the data and file structure

**Experiment 1**- The first experiment contains data from dietdata.csv (primary data set) as well as feedingdata.csv (subset of individuals used for feeding trials) and extraction_data.csv (subset of individuals used for melanin extraction). 

**diet_data.csv:**

ID- Unique larval identifier

diet_treatment- One of the 5 diet treatments (see text for details)

photo_mass- Mass (grams) at the time the photo was taken

devo_total_time- Total development time from egg to end of 5th instar

devo_5th_length- Time (in days) of the 5th instar

blocking_mass- Mass (grams) after gut purge/ before pupation

melanin_percent - Proportion of melanin pixels of total pixels

darkness- Calculated by subtracting the average gray value under the threshold from 35 (see text for details)

**feeding_data.csv:**

ID- Unique larval ...,