Does the strength of an immune response reflect its energetic cost?
Författare
Summary, in English
The energetic cost of immune responses has been proposed to be an important basis for trade-offs between life-history traits, such as between survival and reproduction. A critical assumption of this hypothesis is that the magnitude of the energetic cost increases with the strength of an immune response, so that energy can be saved by partly suppressing a response. Here, we test this assumption experimentally. The immune system of great tits Parus major was experimentally activated by injecting different doses of phytohemagglutinin (PHA) in the wing web. We found the resting metabolic rate of immune challenged birds to increase by 5%. However, although great tits injected with a high dose had a stronger immune response, this was not paralleled by a higher metabolic rate. Thus, we found the energetic cost of the immune response to be relatively low and not dose-dependent. This suggests to us that the energetic cost of immune responses cannot form the basis for trade-offs between life-history traits.
Publiceringsår
2007
Språk
Engelska
Sidor
488-494
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
Journal of Avian Biology
Volym
38
Issue
4
Länkar
Dokumenttyp
Artikel i tidskrift
Förlag
Wiley-Blackwell
Ämne
- Biological Sciences
Status
Published
Forskningsgrupp
- Molecular Ecology and Evolution Lab
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISSN: 0908-8857