Meta-analysis of the effects of insect pathogens: Implications for plant reproduction

Despite extensive work on both insect disease and plant reproduction, there is little research on the intersection of the two. Insect-infecting pathogens could disrupt the pollination process by affecting pollinator population density or traits. Pathogens may also infect insect herbivores and change herbivory, potentially altering resource allocation to plant reproduction. We conducted a meta-analysis to 1) summarize the literature on the effects of pathogens on insect pollinators and herbivores and 2) quantify the extent to which pathogens affect insect traits, with potential repercussions for plant reproduction. We found 39 articles that fit our criteria for inclusion, extracting 218 measures of insect traits for 21 different insect species exposed to 25 different pathogens. We detected a negative effect of pathogen exposure on insect traits, which varied by host function: pathogens had a significant negative effect on insects that were herbivores or carried multiple functions but not..., Dataset contains 218 comparisons from 39 published articles used in a metaanalysis on how pathogen exposure affects traits of insect pollinators and herbivores.
We used the Web of Science database to search for relevant bodies of literature using the following search criteria:
Topic [TS]=(lepidoptera* OR bees OR bee OR fly OR butterfl* OR moth OR hymenopter* OR Bombus OR Apis OR bumble* OR aphid* OR caterpillar* OR larva* OR arthropod* OR insect* OR pollinati* OR herbivor* OR orthoptera OR spider* OR hemiptera OR coleoptera OR beetle) AND TS=(trait* OR morpholo* OR proboscis OR foraging OR learn* OR abundance OR sub-lethal OR sublethal) AND Author Keywords [AK]=(disease* OR viru* OR pathogen* OR parasite* OR infect*) AND Title [TI]=(disease* OR viru* OR pathogen* OR parasite* OR infect*).
These search criteria yielded 1879 hits from scientific literature published from 1997 to July 9, 2020. A second search was conducted to obtain articles previous to 1997, which yielded 1181 papers (ran..., Data are in a .csv file that can be opened in Excel or imported into statistical software such as R. The last two columns of the dataset (effect size and corresponding sampling variance) were produced by the rma function in the R package metafor.