Malaria parasites, immune challenge, MHC variability, and predator avoidance in a passerine bird

László Zsolt Garamszegi, Magdalena Zagalska-Neubauer, David Canal, Gábor Markó, Eszter Szász, Sándor Zsebők, Eszter Szöllősi, Gábor Herczeg and János Török

Behavioral Ecology, 2015, vol. 26, issue 5, 1292-1302

Abstract: Several hypotheses predict a relationship between parasite burden and risk-taking behavior, but the underlying causal mechanisms are poorly understood due to the scarcity of experimental studies and the neglected focus on immune defense. Here, in 3 sets of field studies on the collared flycatcher, Ficedula albicollis, we investigated how among-male variation in flight initiation distance (FID, the distance at which an individual flee a potential predator) is linked to among-male variation in health status. First, we correlatively assessed the relationship between FID and the prevalence of haemosporidian blood parasites. We found no difference in risk-taking behavior between parasitized and nonparasitized individuals rejecting a hypothesis that predicts that malaria infection status affects the costs of predator avoidance. Second, we performed an immune challenge experiment, in which randomly chosen birds were injected with a novel antigen (sheep red blood cell) and their change in FID was compared with birds that received a placebo treatment. This experiment revealed no evidence for the immunological treatment affecting risk-taking behavior, thus we failed to obtain support for the hypothesis that posits that immediate health status mediates decisions about when to flee a predator. Finally, we detected a negative relationship between the number of alleles of the major histocompatibility complex and FID. This result, in concordance with the above negative results, supports the "avoidance" hypothesis that states that only individuals with efficient immune defense machinery are able to bear the costs of risk-taking that can emerge through the increased infection rates of risk-taker individuals.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arv077 (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:26:y:2015:i:5:p:1292-1302.

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 ().