Data from: The more the merrier: conspecific density improves performance of gregarious larvae and reduces susceptibility to a pupal parasitoid
| Main Authors: | Rosa, Elena, van Nouhuys, Saskya, Saastamoinen, Marjo |
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| Format: | info dataset Journal |
| Terbitan: |
, 2018
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| Online Access: |
https://zenodo.org/record/4970213 |
Daftar Isi:
- Aggregation can confer advantages in animal foraging, defense and thermoregulation. There is a tight connection between the evolution of insect sociality and a highly effective immune system, presumably to inhibit rapid disease spread in a crowded environment. This connection is less evident for animals that spend only part of their life-cycle in a social environment, such as non-eusocial gregarious insects. Our aim was to elucidate the effects of group living by the gregarious larvae of the Glanville fritillary butterfly with respect to individual performance, immunity and susceptibility to a parasitoid. We were also interested in the role of family relative to common post-diapause environment in shaping life-history traits. Larvae were reared at high or low density and then exposed to the pupal parasitoid wasp Pteromalus apum, either in presence or absence of a previous immune challenge that was used to measure the encapsulation immune response. Surviving adult butterflies were further tested for immunity. The wasp offspring from successfully parasitized butterfly pupae were counted and their brood sex-ratios assessed. Larvae reared at high density grew larger and faster than those at low density. Despite high mortality due to parasitism, survival was greater among individuals with high pupal immunity in both density treatments. Moreover, butterfly pupae reared at high density were able to kill a larger fraction of individuals in the parasitoid broods, although this did not increase survival of the host. Finally, a larger proportion of variation observed in most of the traits was explained by butterfly family than by common post-diapause rearing environment, except for adult survival and immunity, for which this pattern was reversed. This gregarious butterfly clearly benefits from high conspecific density in terms of developmental performance and its ability to fight a parasitoid. These positive effects may be driven by cooperative interactions during feeding.
- Larval density dataData set life-history variables related to butterfly individuals that successfully reached the pupal stage. The description of each variable is provided as a comment in the Excel file.DENSITY.xlsxLarval survival dataIndividual data of butterfly larvae from the initiation of the experiment describing whether or not they survived until pupation. The description of each variable is provided as a comment in the Excel file.Life.xlsxWasp brood dataA data set including life-history variables about the wasp broods originating from a subset of butterfly pupae that were successfully parasitized by a parasitoid wasp. The description of each variable is provided as a comment in the Excel file.Wasp.xlsxModel selectionR script with model selection based on the three data files.R_script.txt