10
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Immune defense and host life history.

      1 ,
      The American naturalist
      University of Chicago Press

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Recent interest has focused on immune response in an evolutionary context, with particular attention to disease resistance as a life-history trait, subject to trade-offs against other traits such as reproductive effort. Immune defense has several characteristics that complicate this approach, however; for example, because of the risk of autoimmunity, optimal immune defense is not necessarily maximum immune defense. Two important types of cost associated with immunity in the context of life history are resource costs, those related to the allocation of essential but limited resources, such as energy or nutrients, and option costs, those paid not in the currency of resources but in functional or structural components of the organism. Resource and option costs are likely to apply to different aspects of resistance. Recent investigations into possible trade-offs between reproductive effort, particularly sexual displays, and immunity have suggested interesting functional links between the two. Although all organisms balance the costs of immune defense against the requirements of reproduction, this balance works out differently for males than it does for females, creating sex differences in immune response that in turn are related to ecological factors such as the mating system. We conclude that immune response is indeed costly and that future work would do well to include invertebrates, which have sometimes been neglected in studies of the ecology of immune defense.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Am Nat
          The American naturalist
          University of Chicago Press
          1537-5323
          0003-0147
          Oct 2002
          : 160 Suppl 4
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Department of Biology, University of California, Riverside, California 92521, USA.
          Article
          10.1086/342131
          18707455
          e688ac83-84fe-4aaf-aba2-ac431d1b3813
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article