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Fitness costs of an immune response in the house martin (Delichon urbica)

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Abstract

Immune responses constitute a major way for hosts to defend themselves against parasites. Because hosts do not habitually produce strong responses all the time, immune responses might be costly to produce or maintain. We tested experimentally if the production of a response to a challenge with a novel antigen resulted in a cost in terms of fitness using the highly colonial house martin Delichon urbica as a model system. We injected adult breeding birds during laying of the first clutch with either Newcastle disease virus (NDV) or a control injection, and the clutch was subsequently removed to induce relaying. NDV stimulates the non-specific immune system, causing production of antibodies during a period of more than 2 weeks. Accordingly, we found an increase in leukocyte counts in experimental birds compared to controls. Experimental treatment reduced the frequency of re-laying, caused a delay in timing of relaying and a reduction in brood size. Quality of nestlings in terms of body size, body mass and T-cell-mediated immune response did not differ significantly between treatments. Overall, seasonal reproductive success differed significantly between treatments, showing that the production of an immune response by adult birds is costly in terms of future fecundity.

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Acknowledgements

The research was funded by a research project of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (CGL2006-2937). AM was supported by a post-doctoral (EX-2006-0557) fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. MIR was supported by grants from the Spanish Ministry of Science (BES 2004-4886). We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for suggestions to improve the article. The experiments comply with the current laws of Spain where the experiments were performed.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Biología Animal, Universidad de Extremadura, 06071, Badajoz, Spain

    Alfonso Marzal, Maribel Reviriego & Florentino de Lope

  2. Department of Animal Ecology, Ecology Building, Lund University, 223 62, Lund, Sweden

    Alfonso Marzal

  3. Laboratoire de Parasitologie Evolutive, CNRS UMR 7103, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Bât. A, 7ème étage, 7 quai St. Bernard, Case 237, 75252, Paris Cedex 05, France

    Anders Pape Møller

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  1. Alfonso Marzal
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  2. Maribel Reviriego
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  3. Florentino de Lope
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  4. Anders Pape Møller
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Correspondence to Alfonso Marzal.

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Communicated by I. Hartley

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Marzal, A., Reviriego, M., de Lope, F. et al. Fitness costs of an immune response in the house martin (Delichon urbica). Behav Ecol Sociobiol 61, 1573–1580 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-007-0389-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-007-0389-z

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