Ontogeny of leukocyte profiles in a wild altricial passerine
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Ontogeny of leukocyte profiles in a wild altricial passerine Jaime Muriel1 · Carmen Vida2 · Diego Gil3 · Lorenzo Pérez‑Rodríguez4 Received: 2 April 2020 / Revised: 8 September 2020 / Accepted: 28 October 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Ecophysiological studies have highlighted the relevance of the avian immune system in individual fitness prospects in the wild. However, studies on the ontogeny of avian immunity are scarce. We analyse age-related changes in the cellular constitutive immunity throughout nestling development, as well as its relationship with sex and brood size. We found that cellular constitutive immunity could be affected by age, sex, brood size, or daily rhythm. Early-stage nestlings relied more on cells of the innate immunity rather than on cells linked to the adaptive immune system. Cellular immunity may not be fully mature in fledglings, as reflected by differences in phagocytic cell counts with regard to adults. Beyond the age-dependent effects, agranulocyte cell counts were affected by sibling competition while granulocyte cell counts showed a daily rhythm. We also show that the heterophil to lymphocyte ratio was negatively related to body weight when nestlings become more independent. Our study contributes knowledge to the fields of developmental immunology and ecological immunology based on essential components of the cellular immune system. Keywords Age-specific pattern · Cell-mediated immunity · Daily rhythm · Leukocyte count · Nestling development · Sturnus unicolor
Introduction Hosts develop different immunological mechanisms to protect themselves against pathogens, but their maintenance and effective functioning are costly (Sheldon and Verhulst 1996; Hasselquist and Nilsson 2012). Therefore, from an Communicated by Philip Withers. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00360-020-01323-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Jaime Muriel [email protected] 1
Instituto Pirenaico de Ecología, IPE (CSIC), Avda. Nuestra Señora de la Victoria 16, 22700 Jaca, Spain
2
Department of Biology Systems, Faculty of Medicine, University of Alcalá, C/19, Av. de Madrid, Km 33,600, 28871 Alcalá de Henares,, Madrid, Spain
3
Departamento de Ecología Evolutiva, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN-CSIC), José Gutiérrez Abascal 2, 28006 Madrid, Spain
4
Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos, IREC (CSIC, UCLM, JCCM), Ronda de Toledo 12, 13005 Ciudad Real, Spain
evolutionary and ecological perspective, we may expect that high investment in immunity must be traded off against investment in other costly traits, such as growth during the nestling period (Van Der Most et al. 2011) or reproductive traits for adults (Ardia 2005; Colominas-Ciuró et al. 2017), which require high energetic demands, in particular during the breeding season (Kulaszewicz et al. 2017). Field studies have used white blood cells
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