Animals have a Plan B: how insects deal with the dual challenge of predators and pathogens
- PDF / 1,026,290 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 85 Downloads / 201 Views
REVIEW
Animals have a Plan B: how insects deal with the dual challenge of predators and pathogens Shelley A. Adamo1 Received: 14 February 2020 / Revised: 8 April 2020 / Accepted: 27 April 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract When animals are faced with a life-threatening challenge, they mount an organism-wide response (i.e. Plan A). For example, both the stress response (i.e. fight-or-flight) and the immune response recruit molecular resources from other body tissues, and induce physiological changes that optimize the body for defense. However, pathogens and predators often co-occur. Animals that can optimize responses for a dual challenge, i.e. simultaneous predator and pathogen attacks, will have a selective advantage. Responses to a combined predator and pathogen attack have not been well studied, but this paper summarizes the existing literature in insects. The response to dual challenges (i.e. Plan B) results in a suite of physiological changes that are different from either the stress response or the immune response, and is not a simple summation of the two. It is also not a straight-forward trade-off of one response against the other. The response to a dual challenge (i.e. Plan B) appears to resolve physiological trade-offs between the stress and immune responses, and reconfigures both responses to provide the best overall defense. However, the dual response appears to be more costly than either response occurring singly, resulting in greater damage from oxidative stress, reduced growth rate, and increased mortality. Keywords Ecoimmunology · Predator–prey interactions · Predator stress · Immune trade-offs · Psychoneuroimmunology
Introduction When animals are faced with a life-threatening challenge (e.g. predators, pathogens, heat stress, toxins etc.), they mount an organism-wide response (i.e. Plan A). Animals reconfigure their physiology to maximize defense against the threat (e.g. fight-or-flight stress responses, vertebrates, Harris and Carr 2016; invertebrates, Roeder 1999). This reconfiguration includes removing resources from other systems. For example, both the stress response (i.e. fight-or-flight: vertebrates, Harris and Carr 2016; invertebrates, Roeder 1999) and the immune response (e.g. mammals, Wang et al. 2019; insects, Dolezal et al. 2019) recruit molecular resources from different body tissues, and induce physiological changes that optimize the organism for defense against the challenge. Both stress responses (e.g. Miyashita and Communicated by Philip Withers. * Shelley A. Adamo [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS B3H 3X5, Canada
Adamo 2020, Harris and Carr 2016) and immune responses (Dolezal et al. 2019; Wang et al. 2019) are examples of physiological networks that involve multiple organ systems. Hormones mediate some of these cross-organ interactions (e.g. insects, Table 1). Although there is some overlap in how the immune response and stress response recruit resources and affect other sy
Data Loading...
