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Baseline innate immunity does not affect the response to an immune challenge in female great tits (Parus major)

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Abstract

The immune system is an important defence against pathogens but requires resources that hosts may also use otherwise. Thus, trade-offs between investment in immunity versus other life-history traits may exist, especially during resource-demanding periods such as reproduction. Here, we investigated the potential trade-off between an activated immune system and parental care in free-living great tits. We also studied whether variation in baseline immune indices prior to immunization contributes to individual differences in the responses to an immune challenge. To this end, we injected free-living great tit females with either phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) or with bacterial lipopolysaccharides (LPS) when nestlings were 9 days old and subsequently recorded parental feeding rates. We quantified potential fitness consequences via the growth and survival of their nestlings. Exposure to LPS tended to decrease female feeding rates. However, nestling body mass was not affected by the maternal immune challenge, probably because males compensated for the change in feeding rate of their partner. We found a negative relationship between haptoglobin levels and female feeding rates pre-treatment, but not with any of the other innate immune traits. Although there was substantial variation in female innate immune indices, we found no evidence that baseline immunity affected how females reacted to an immune challenge in terms of changes in parental behaviour.

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Acknowledgments

We greatly thank Jel D’Hollander for assisting in the field, Josie Meaney-Ward for improving the English and Thomas Raap for his valuable comments on the manuscript. Further, we would like to thank Kevin D. Matson for teaching us the immune techniques. We would also like to thank the University of Antwerp for funding.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology – Behavioural Ecology and Ecophysiology Group, University of Antwerp, Campus Drie Eiken, Universiteitsplein 1, 2610, Antwerp, Wilrijk, Belgium

    Anke Vermeulen, Marcel Eens, Erika Zaid & Wendt Müller

Authors
  1. Anke Vermeulen
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  2. Marcel Eens
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  3. Erika Zaid
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  4. Wendt Müller
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anke Vermeulen.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

This study was approved by the ethical committee of the University of Antwerp (ID number 201131), and it was performed in accordance with Belgian and Flemish laws.

Funding

This study was made possible by a PhD studentship to AV from the University of Antwerp.

Informed consent

This article does not contain experiments with human participants.

Additional information

Communicated by I. R. Hartley

Significance Statement

Innate immunity is a central component of vertebrate immunity, representing the first line of defence. However, there is a large amount of among individual variation in baseline innate immunity, potentially indicating differences in individual defence strategies, as baseline levels may be costly to maintain while being central for the effectiveness of a first immune response. To study the adaptive significance of baseline innate immunity levels, we investigated whether the trade-off between raising an immune response and parental provisioning depended on (previously measured) baseline innate immunity levels. We found only weak support for the existence of a trade-off, which was also unaffected by the levels of baseline innate immunity. Thus, the functional consequences of variation in innate immunity levels remain unclear, urging for further studies to explore the relatively unknown field of innate immunity.

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Vermeulen, A., Eens, M., Zaid, E. et al. Baseline innate immunity does not affect the response to an immune challenge in female great tits (Parus major). Behav Ecol Sociobiol 70, 585–592 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-016-2077-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-016-2077-3

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