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Free keywords:
acute phase response
bacterial infection
birdsong
dietary carotenoid
fitness-related traits
lipopolysaccharide
lps
lutein
sickness behaviour
Abstract:
Life history theory predicts that individuals have to trade-off resources between diverse energy-demanding activ- ities, such as mounting an immune response and performing advertisement behaviour. The availability of immunomodula- tory micronutrients can affect this trade-off. Carotenoids can upregulate both the humoral and cell-mediated immune re- sponse, but little is known about their effect on behavioural traits during the sickness phase induced by a common inflam- mation. To investigate whether dietary carotenoids can miti- gate the severity of the sickness syndrome and promote fitness-related traits, we studied how the song rate of captive male European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris, Linnaeus 1758) receiving dietary carotenoids and coping with a challenge (li- popolysaccharide, LPS) mimicking a bacterial infection var- ied during the sickness phase and the subsequent recovery phase. We found that birds not provisioned with carotenoids and injected with LPS sang less than control birds during the sickness phase, but not during the recovery phase.Conversely, birds provided access to a carotenoid-enriched diet never de- creased their song rate. Our results show that immune- challenged birds have to trade-off between mounting an im- mune response and advertising only when their access to die- tary carotenoids is limited. No differences in song rate were observed between treatments during the recovery phase. Our study is the first to investigate the role of dietary carotenoids Communicated by K.McGraw * Stefania Casagrande scasagrande@orn.mpg.de 1 Department of Biology, Ethology Group, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium 2 Institute for Education and Information Sciences, Research Unit Didactica, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium on a behavioural syndrome-like sickness and to show that providing a carotenoid-rich diet can alleviate the social costs associated
