Author ORCID Identifier
Emma Sellers: 0009-0002-2111-3883
Mayra Vidal: 0000-0003-3374-8050
Dhaval Vyas: 0000-0002-6038-606X
Mykaela Tanino-Springsteen: 0000-0002-1042-5470
Gina Wimp: 0000-0002-6255-109X
Mattheau Comerford: 0000-0002-1444-365X
Mariana Abarca: 0000-0002-6944-2574
Shannon Murphy: 0000-0002-5746-6536
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2026
Publication Title
Ecology
Abstract
The environment or experiences of a parent generation can impact the fitness of the next generation, a phenomenon known as parental effects. While a high-quality diet can directly benefit an individual and a low-quality diet can reduce fitness, a parental effect occurs only when there is a transgenerational response to these stimuli that manifests in the individual’s offspring. In dietary generalists, a parental effect could play an important role for offspring performance if the species experiences considerable variation in quality across host plants; posi- tive parental effects may result from host matching between parents and offspring on high-quality host plants, whereas negative effects may result from host matching on low-quality host plants or parent-offspring host mismatching. A lack of strong parental effects across host plants may also help explain the maintenance of dietary generalism for generalist herbivores. We investigated whether parental effects occur in the generalist herbivore fall webworm (Hyphantria cunea) by test- ing whether offspring performance depended on the host plant on which the parental generation was reared. We found that parental effects do not play an important role for fall webworm and the weak effects that do exist depend on both the larval and parental host plant. Rather than demonstrating benefits of parent-host matching, our results demonstrate that the offspring of parents from one poor-quality host performed worse on one high-quality host than offspring from any of the other hosts. Overall, our study suggests that larval host plant iden- tity rather than parental effects is important to the performance of this generalist herbivore. Notably, a lack of strong, consistent parental effects may help explain the maintenance of dietary generalism in an extreme generalist herbivore.
Keywords
Erebidae, fall webworm (Hyphantria cunea), fitness, host plant, Lepidoptera, transgenerational effect
Volume
107
Issue
10
First Page
e70499
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
© 2026 The Author(s).
Version
Version of Record
Recommended Citation
Sellers, Emma J.; Vidal, Mayra C.; Vyas, Dhaval K.; Tanino-Springsteen, Mykaela; Wimp, Gina M.; Comerford, Mattheau S.; Abarca, Mariana; and Murphy, Shannon M., "Parents Don’t Dictate the Menu: Lack of Strong Host-Specific Parental Effects may Help Maintain Dietary Generalism" (2026). Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/bio_facpubs/351