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6 May 2019 Constitutive innate immunity of tropical House Wrens varies with season and reproductive activity
B. Irene Tieleman, Maaike A. Versteegh, Kirk C. Klasing, Joseph B. Williams
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Abstract

In lowland Neotropical regions, where air temperature and day length remain relatively constant year round, seasonality is determined primarily by changes in rainfall. The wet season triggers the start of breeding for many Neotropical birds but also alters the antigenic environment, likely increasing the risk of disease transmission. We explored 2 hypotheses about temporal variation in constitutive innate immunity of a Neotropical bird, the House Wren (Troglodytes aedon). The antigen response hypothesis proposes that Neotropical wrens upregulate their immune function in the wet season either in anticipation of or in response to vectors that become more prevalent. The resource constraint hypothesis proposes that during periods of putative high resource demand, such as when parents are feeding young, immune function should be compromised and downregulated. Controlling for reproductive stage, we found that microbicidal capacity of blood against Escherichia coli was higher in the wet than the dry season, consistent with the antigen response hypothesis. Phagocytosis of E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus did not differ between wet and dry seasons. Microbicidal capacity and H/L ratio of tropical House Wrens did not vary among reproductive stages, and our data offered no support for the idea that immune function is compromised during the period when parents are feeding young.

© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press for the American Ornithological Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
B. Irene Tieleman, Maaike A. Versteegh, Kirk C. Klasing, and Joseph B. Williams "Constitutive innate immunity of tropical House Wrens varies with season and reproductive activity," The Auk 136(3), 1-10, (6 May 2019). https://doi.org/10.1093/auk/ukz029
Received: 25 October 2018; Accepted: 14 March 2019; Published: 6 May 2019
KEYWORDS
birds
microbicidal capacity of blood
phagocytosis
Seasonality
tropics
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