Lipid provisioning in eggs of an extreme dietary generalist

Abstract Parents can provide care to their offspring to increase their offspring's chance of survival. There are various types of parental care across insect taxa, one of which is maternal investment. Lipids, the most energy‐dense of macronutrients, are considered a good estimate of maternal investment in insects. However, it is not clear how different environments, such as host plants, can impact provisioning, especially for dietary generalists that feed on an array of plant species with varying quality. Using an extreme dietary generalist, fall webworm (FW, Hyphantria cunea ), we investigated if females provision different amounts of lipids into their eggs depending on the diet they fed upon as larvae. We measured the lipid content of FW egg clusters from parents reared on seven host plant species of varying quality. We found that parental host plants influenced egg provisioning, such that provisioning depends on host plant but also increases most for parents reared on low‐quality diets. Additionally, we found that female parents with heavier pupal mass produced egg clusters with greater lipids per egg. Our results provide evidence that egg provisioning can depend on the parental environment and suggest that the use of low‐quality host plants by generalist herbivores may be partially overcome via maternal investment.