Abstract
Investment in immune defences is predicted to covary with a variety of ecologically and evolutionarily relevant axes, with pace of life and environmental antigen exposure being two examples. These axes may themselves covary directly or inversely, and such relationships can lead to conflicting predictions regarding immune investment. If pace of life shapes immune investment then, following life history theory, slow-living, arid zone and tropical species should invest more in immunity than fast-living temperate species. Alternatively, if antigen exposure drives immune investment, then species in antigen-rich tropical and temperate environments are predicted to exhibit higher immune indices than species from antigen-poor arid locations. To test these contrasting predictions we investigated how variation in pace of life and antigen exposure influence immune investment in related lark species (Alaudidae) with differing life histories and predicted risks of exposure to environmental microbes and parasites. We used clutch size and total number of eggs laid per year as indicators of pace of life, and aridity, and the climatic variables that influence aridity, as correlates of antigen abundance. We quantified immune investment by measuring four indices of innate immunity. Pace of life explained little of the variation in immune investment, and only one immune measure correlated significantly with pace of life, but not in the predicted direction. Conversely, aridity, our proxy for environmental antigen exposure, was predictive of immune investment, and larks in more mesic environments had higher immune indices than those living in arid, low-risk locations. Our study suggests that abiotic environmental variables with strong ties to environmental antigen exposure can be important correlates of immunological variation.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the following people and organisations for logistical support, and for permission to work with wild birds: HRH Prince Bandar bin Saud, Secretary General of the Saudi Wildlife Commission, Mr Ahmad Al Bouq, Director of the National Wildlife Research Center and staff at Taif and Mahazat as-Sayd, Saudi Arabia; Staatsbosbeheer and volunteers on the Aekingerzand Lark Project, the Netherlands; Muchai Muchane, National Museums Kenya, Friends of Kinangop Plateau, and Sarah Higgins, Kenya. Sample collection in Afghanistan was made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development and its collaborative grantee the Wildlife Conservation Society. We thank Bob Ricklefs for commenting on an earlier version of the manuscript, and Dieter Luckas and Rose Thorogood for assistance with phylogenetic analyses. Two anonymous reviewers also gave useful comments on an earlier manuscript draft. Financial support came from the Schure-Beijerinck-Poppings Fonds (to N. P. C. H. and A. H.), BirdLife Netherlands (to B. I. T.), NSF grant IBN 0212587 (to J. B. W.), and VENI and VIDI grants from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (to K. D. M. and B. I. T.).
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Horrocks, N.P.C., Hegemann, A., Ostrowski, S. et al. Environmental proxies of antigen exposure explain variation in immune investment better than indices of pace of life. Oecologia 177, 281–290 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3136-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-3136-y