Intra- and interspecific relationships between nest size and immunity

Juan José Soler, Manuel Martín-Vivaldi, Claudy Haussy and Anders Pape Møller

Behavioral Ecology, 2007, vol. 18, issue 4, 781-791

Abstract: Nest-building behavior has been suggested to represent a postmating sexually selected signal in passerine birds, an hypothesis that has received both comparative and experimental support. Because selection pressure due to parasites and diseases should be particularly high during nest building, mainly due to energetic costs and depression of the immune system associated with this reproductive phase, we predicted a positive association between nest-building effort and immunity. Nest-building effort would reflect the ability to produce efficient immune responses of builders only if individuals with a superior immune system would display exaggerated nest-building effort. We tested this prediction by studying the relationship between volume of nest material used for nest construction and, at the intraspecific level, estimates of innate humoral immune response in barn swallows Hirundo rustica. At the interspecific level, we used responses to the mitogenic phytohemagglutinin as an indicator of adaptive immune response of European passerine species. As predicted, we found, after controlling for several potential confounding factors, that volume of nest material was positively related to immune response both at the intra- and at the interspecific level. Alternative hypotheses explaining the comparative results are discussed. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arm045 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:18:y:2007:i:4:p:781-791

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().