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Host Responses to Pathogen Priming in a Natural Songbird Host

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Abstract

Hosts in free-living populations can experience substantial variation in the frequency and dose of pathogen exposure, which can alter disease progression and protection from future exposures. In the house finch–Mycoplasma gallisepticum (MG) system, the pathogen is primarily transmitted via bird feeders, and some birds may be exposed to frequent low doses of MG while foraging. Here we experimentally determined how low dose, repeated exposures of house finches to MG influence host responses and protection from secondary high-dose challenge. MG-naive house finches were given priming exposures that varied in dose and total number. After quantifying host responses to priming exposures, all birds were given a secondary high-dose challenge to assess immunological protection. Dose, but not the number of exposures, significantly predicted both infection and disease severity following priming exposure. Furthermore, individuals given higher priming doses showed stronger protection upon secondary, high-dose challenge. However, even single low-dose exposures to MG, a proxy for what some birds likely experience in the wild while feeding, provided significant protection against a high-dose challenge. Our results suggest that bird feeders, which serve as sources of infection in the wild, may in some cases act as “immunizers,” with important consequences for disease dynamics.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by NIH grant 5R01GM105245 as part of the joint NIH-NSF-USDA Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases program. Additional fellowship support for A. Leon provided by the Virginia Tech IMSD program funded through NIH-NIGMS grant R25GM072767-09. We thank members of the House Finch Project Group for useful discussion. We especially thank Laila Kirkpatrick for running all qPCR assays, David Ley for providing inoculum, and André Dhondt, Wesley Hochachka, James Adelman, Sahnzi Moyers, Skylar Hopkins, Arietta Fleming-Davies, Courtney Thomason, Joel McGlothlin, Rami Dalloul and Liwu Li for valuable feedback. We thank Dan Cristol and Trevor Sleight for their assistance in trapping house finches in Williamsburg, VA. We thank Catherine Beach, Johanel Caceres, Dorian Jackson, David Vasquez, and Courtney Youngbar for assistance in data collection.

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  1. Department of Biological Sciences, Virginia Tech, 2119 Derring Hall (0406), Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA

    Ariel E. Leon & Dana M. Hawley

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Leon, A.E., Hawley, D.M. Host Responses to Pathogen Priming in a Natural Songbird Host. EcoHealth 14, 793–804 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10393-017-1261-x

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