Lipid provisioning in the eggs of an extreme dietary generalist

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. Additi..., , # Lipid provisioning in the eggs of an extreme dietary generalist

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.brv15dvmq](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\" ...,