Individual life history data from a resource degradation and temperature variation life history experiment in the Plodia-Venturia host-parasitoid interaction

The unparasitized and parasitized hosts life history experiment used hosts from laboratory stock cultures and parasitoids from a laboratory parthenogenetic thelytokous (asexual) strain, which were kept on non-degraded host resource at constant 28°C in incubators with a 16:8h light cycle. Daily temperature variation and host resource degradation (also referred as ‘diet’ in datasets) were manipulated in a full factorial design. Two temperature treatments in each resource degradation treatment were compared. Both temperature treatments were characterized by a mean temperature of 26°C, which did not vary in the constant (‘CST’) treatment and varied randomly between 22.3 and 30.2°C every 24h in the variable (‘VAR’) treatment (26°C ± 1.5°C SD, AR(1) = 0.02, 95% CI [-0.10, 0.14].

A gradient of resource degradation was created from none to high by replacing 0, 25, 50 and 75 % of wheat germ in the host’s diet with methyl cellulose, an indigestible bulking agent with no nutritional value. The life history experiment started on day 5 of the temperature time series and lasted for 74 days.

There were 40 unparasitized and 25 parasitized host larvae in each temperature by resource degradation treatment. Each host egg in the unparasitized hosts assay was kept individually (i.e., no competition for resources) under its assigned temperature treatment with 0.3 g of its assigned diet (ad libitum) and monitored daily until death for life history and morphological traits. Host eggs in the parasitized hosts assay were kept in 8 groups of 100 eggs under their assigned temperature treatment with 30.0 g of their assigned resource until they were parasitized. Parasitism took place over a period of three days from age 20 to 22 days [8-9 larva per treatment parasitized on each day as fourth or fifth instars, the most suitable hosts for Venturia’s development]. Parasitized larvae were then kept individually under their assigned temperature treatment with 0.3 g of their assigned resource and monitored daily until the death of the host, the parasitoid or both. More details of the material and methods can be found in the Supplementary information.

This dataset is included in the following collections

How does resource degradation and coloured temperature variation alter population dynamics in a host-parasitoid trophic interaction.