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Does the strength of an immune response reflect its energetic cost?

In English

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

Dokumenttyp

Artikel i tidskrift

Förlag

Wiley-Blackwell

Ämne

  • Biological Sciences

Status

Published

Forskningsgrupp

  • Molecular Ecology and Evolution Lab

ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt

  • ISSN: 0908-8857