DOI: 10.5061/dryad.9s4mw6mmw
title: Data from: Meta-analysis of the effects of insect pathogens: Implications for plant reproduction

description: 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 on
 insects that solely functioned as pollinators. Particular pathogen types
 were  heavily studied in certain insect orders, with 7 of 11
 viral pathogen studies conducted in Lepidoptera and 5 of 9 fungal pathogen
 studies conducted in Hymenoptera. Our results suggest that most studies
 have focused on a small set of host–pathogen pairs. To understand the
 implications for plant reproduction, future work is needed to directly
 measure the effects of pathogens on pollinator effectiveness.
description: 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 <strong>fly</strong> 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 (range 1989–1996). Scientific
 literature considered was published in English and included articles, book
 chapters, reviews, published conference proceedings or abstracts,
 dissertations, and theses. From this search, we employed the following
 criteria of inclusion: 1) Insect species must belong to
 an insect order with known species that are herbivores or
 pollinators. 2) The article contained quantitative data
 on the effects of pathogens, specifically sample size, mean, and some
 measure of variability (e.g., standard deviation or standard error) on
 insect behavior, demography, physiology, or morphology. This data needed
 to be collected for both uninfected and infected insects. Infected insects
 could be exposed to any dose of the pathogen. Observational studies were
 included if they measured traits of both naturally infected and uninfected
 insects. 3) Only pathogens for which insects are the
 primary host were considered. Plant or vertebrate diseases for which
 insects act as the disease vector were excluded. 4) If
 multiple pathogen species were studied, data must have been collected on
 each pathogen species separately. Coinfection data were
 excluded. The following data were extracted from each
 research article: (1) insect taxonomy, (2) pathogen taxonomy, (3) host
 function (pollinator, herbivore, or 'multi-function'), (4)
 infected life stage, (5) effect type and description, (6) life stage of
 the observed effect, (7) experiment type (observational or manipulative)
 and location (field or lab), (8) pathogen treatment and dose, and (9)
 quantitative data from which to calculate effect size (sample size, mean,
 and standard deviation or standard error). Extracted data (1) through (8)
 were used to document how different variables could play a role in the
 sublethal effects of pathogens on the traits of insect pollinators or
 herbivores. See attached metadata file (metadata.csv)
 for variable names and detailed descriptions of each of the
 variables.
description: 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.