Food quality effects on instar-specific life histories of a holometabolous insect

It is a long-standing challenge to understand how changes in food resources impact consumer life history traits and, in turn, impact how organisms interact with their environment. To characterize food quality effects on life history, most studies follow organisms throughout their life cycle and quantify major life events, such as age at maturity or fecundity. From these studies, we know that food quality generally impacts body size, juvenile development, and life span. Importantly, throughout juvenile development, many organisms develop through several stages of growth that can have different interactions with their environment. For example, parasitoids typically attack larger instars, whereas larval insect predators typically attack smaller instars. Interestingly, most studies lump all juvenile stages together, which ignores these ecological changes over juvenile development.  
We combine a cross-sectional experimental approach with a stage-structured population model to estimate ...