Data for: Maternal provisioning of offspring with defence chemicals in a facultatively parthenogenetic stick insect

Parents can invest in offspring by transferring environmental factors, such as nutrients or diet-derived defence chemicals, into eggs or embryos. However, in systems where females can reproduce facultatively without a male (facultative parthenogenesis), it is not known how reproductive mode and maternal environment affect offspring provisioning. The facultatively parthenogenetic stick insect Megacrania batesii sprays a defensive fluid from paired prothoracic glands. Here, we report that some hatchlings of M. batesii can spray even prior to their first feeding, and provide evidence that both eggs and hatchlings contain the same diet-derived chemical (the alkaloid actinidine) that is present in adult defensive spray. We also explored potential causes of variation among hatchlings in the capacity to spray, using a fully crossed experiment to investigate how offspring provisioning is affected by sexual vs. parthenogenetic reproduction and high vs. low maternal diet. We found that high mater..., MATERIALS AND METHODS
Animal maintenance
Eggs of M. batesii were collected from mixed-sex populations of the Northern genotype and all-female populations from the Southern genotype between Cow Bay and Cape Tribulation, Queensland (Miller et al. 2024a), in February and March of 2020 and raised in the lab at UNSW Sydney. Eggs were maintained in 125 mL plastic containers with moist cocopeat in a room with controlled temperature of 27°C and watered periodically to prevent desiccation. Hatchlings (F0) were housed in full-sib same-sex pairs in cylindric plastic cages (20 × 40 cm) and fed leaves of Pandanus tectorius until they become adults. The F1 descendants of those individuals were used in the experiment described below, including 20 females produced by Northern genotype mothers and 24 females produced by Southern genotype mothers. Reproductive mode was manipulated for F1 females descended from both Northern and Southern populations. Twenty days after the females started to lay eggs, 22 f..., , # Data for: Maternal provisioning of offspring with defence chemicals in a facultatively parthenogenetic stick insect

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.vdncjsz48](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.vdncjsz48)

## Description of the data and file structure

The data were collected from a fully crossed experiment in which the reproductive model (sexual / parthenogenetic) and adult diet (High / Low) were manipulated for each of 44 *Megacrania batesii* females.  Each female experienced a single reproductive treatment (either paired with a male throughout life or never paired with a male), but was subjected to both High and Low diet treatments successively. Each diet treatment was applied for 10 days, but eggs were collected from the final 5 days. The response variables included the number of eggs laid by the focal females, egg size, egg development time, egg hatching success, hatchling body size, and the size of hatchlings' prothoracic glands. 

The data are divided into 4 data files for ease of a...,