Struggling to survive: A comparison of Vanessa cardui larval survivorship on putative host plants

The painted lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) is a generalist herbivore with a global distribution. In North America, over 100 species have been identified as V. cardui larval host plants. This cosmopolitan species is commercially available in all life stages and can be reared on an artificial diet. As a result, V. cardui commonly serves as a model organism for education and outreach. However, gaps in our knowledge remain with regard to V. cardui ecology and larval host plant suitability for supporting complete development of larvae to reproductive adulthood. In a laboratory setting, we tested host plant suitability of five reported host plants commonly found in California sage scrub ecosystems by assessing survival of V. cardui caterpillars in their entirety. We also assessed how commercially sourced larvae survived on an artificial diet: both raising the caterpillars exclusively on an artificial diet, as well as switching diets from artificial to thistle (a commonly reported host plant)..., Painted lady larvae were purchased from commercial sources and were reared on differing putative host plants and/or artificial diet configurations to follow survival and pupation success. We complemented the commercial larvae with wild-collected larvae and butterflies and measured the same variables., , # Struggling to survive: A comparison of Vanessa cardui larval survival on putative host plants

This dataset is from the manuscript “Struggling to survive: A comparison of *Vanessa cardui* larval survivorship on putative host plants” and provides the details of the larval survival analyzed in this manuscript.

**date:** Date of death for each larva

**j.date:** Julian date of death

**year:** Year of death

**trial.no:** Trial number of the respective diet treatment

**time:** Age of larva at death

**status:** 1 = alive 2 = dead

**mail.emerge:** y = larva emerged from egg while in mail. n = larva did not emerge from egg while in the mail

**species:** ARTH = artificial diet to thistle. ARTI = artificial only. THAR = thistle to artificial. ABPA = Abutilon palmeri. MACL = Malacothamnus clementinus. MAFA = Malacothamnus fasciculatus. NIGL = Nicotiana glauca. SPAM = Sphaeralcea ambigua

**source:** Source of egg/larvae (oviposition, Carolina Biological Supply Company, Educ...