hosts_lepidoptera — HOSTS database of lepidopteran hostplants (2023)

Description

Bipartite network of butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) and the plants their caterpillars feed on, from HOSTS, the database of the world's lepidopteran hostplants of the Natural History Museum, London, compiled by G. S. Robinson and collaborators from the published literature and from museum collections. The database is no longer updated; the data are those published on the NHM Data Portal in 2023.

Nodes are lepidopteran taxa (species or subspecies, or genera when the species is not given) and hostplant taxa (species, subspecies or varieties, or genera when the species of the plant is not given), and an edge connects a lepidopteran to a hostplant for each record of the database, i.e. each location (a country, or a biogeographic region) in which the caterpillar was recorded on the plant, so that a pair can be connected by several edges. Taxa are identified by their names as given in the database (genus, species and subspecies).

The network has the following properties:

(Node) is_lepidoptera: whether the node is a lepidopteran (otherwise it is a hostplant).
(Node) name: the name of the taxon (genus, species and subspecies or variety).
(Node) family, genus, species, subspecies: the family and the parts of the name of the taxon.
(Node) author (lepidoptera): the author of the name of the lepidopteran taxon.
(Edge) hosts_id: the identifier of the record.
(Edge) location: the country or biogeographic region of the record.
(Edge) damage: the parts of the plant fed upon by the caterpillar, and how (e.g. on leaves, in fruits, in stems; empty if not given).
(Edge) lab_rearing: Y if the record comes from rearing in a laboratory (? if this is uncertain; empty otherwise).

Tags

Biological Ecological Food web Unweighted Bipartite Multigraph Metadata

Added

2026-10-31

Citation

G. S. Robinson, P. R. Ackery, I. Kitching, G. W. Beccaloni, L. M. Hernández, "HOSTS - a Database of the World's Lepidopteran Hostplants." Natural History Museum (2023) 10.5519/havt50xw Sci-Hub

Upstream URL OK

https://doi.org/10.5519/havt50xw
https://data.nhm.ac.uk/dataset/hosts

Upstream license

Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0), https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

Networks

Tip: hover over a column header for a description.

Column legend

$\left<k\right>$: Mean degree
$\sigma_k$: Standard deviation of the degrees
$\lambda_h$: Largest eigenvalue of the Hashimoto (non-backtracking) matrix
$\tau$: Random walk mixing time
$r$: Degree assortativity
$c$: Global clustering coefficient
$\oslash$: (Pseudo-) diameter
$S$: Relative size of the largest component
NPs: Node properties
EPs: Edge properties

Name	Nodes	Edges	$\left<k\right>$	$\sigma_k$	$\lambda_h$	$\tau$	$r$	$c$	$\oslash$	$S$	Kind	Mode	NPs	EPs	gt	GraphML	GML	csv
hosts_lepidoptera	41,493	140,485	6.77	29.01	59.83	186.61	-0.10	0.00	20	0.92	Undirected	Bipartite	is_lepidoptera name family genus species subspecies author	hosts_id location damage lab_rearing	1.7 MiB	2.4 MiB	2.4 MiB	2.2 MiB

Ridiculograms^*

^* These are automatically generated force-directed visualizations, and can be quite meaningless for networks both big and small. They should not be taken seriously as sources of scientific insight. See here for a discussion.