Carry on caring: infected females maintain their parental care despite high mortality.

ABSTRACT: Parental care is a key component of an organism's reproductive strategy that is thought to trade-off with allocation toward immunity. Yet, it is unclear how caring parents respond to pathogens: do infected parents reduce care as a sickness behavior or simply from being ill or do they prioritize their offspring by maintaining high levels of care? To address this issue, we investigated the consequences of infection by the pathogen Serratia marcescens on mortality, time spent providing care, reproductive output, and expression of immune genes of female parents in the burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides. We compared untreated control females with infected females that were inoculated with live bacteria, immune-challenged females that were inoculated with heat-killed bacteria,

SUBMITTER: Ratz T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8842341 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul-Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature