ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2012
Twofold cost of reproduction: an increase in parental effort leads to higher malarial parasitaemia and to a decrease in resistance to oxidative stress.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 138 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Intestinal Parasitic Infections and the Associated Risk Factors Among Malnourished Children Attending Bele Gesgar Hospital in Oromia Region, Ethiopia.Journal of parasitology research · 2025Article
- Effects of nest locations on foraging behavior and physiological responses in seabird colony.Frontiers in physiology · 2025Article
- Reproduction results in parallel changes of oxidative stress and immunocompetence in a wild long-living mammal-edible dormouseBiology letters · 2024Article
- Experimental reduction of haemosporidian infection affects maternal reproductive investment, parental behaviour and offspring condition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Co-infection of intestinal helminths in humans and animals in the Philippines.Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene · 2022Article
- Experiment in semi-natural conditions did not confirm the influence of malaria infection on bird attractiveness to mosquitoes.Parasites & vectors · 2022Article
- Behavioural and physiological plasticity in social hierarchies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Beyond illness: Variation in haemosporidian load explains differences in vocal performance in a songbird.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Article
- Meta-analysis reveals that reproductive strategies are associated with sexual differences in oxidative balance across vertebrates.Current zoology · 2018Article
- Baseline and stress-induced levels of corticosterone in male and female Afrotropical and European temperate stonechats during breeding.BMC evolutionary biology · 2017Article
- Natal dispersers pay a lifetime cost to increased reproductive effort in a wild bird population.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Reproductive effort affects oxidative status and stress in an Antarctic penguin species: An experimental study.PloS one · 2017Article
- Plasmodium infection and oxidative status in breeding great tits, Parus major.Malaria journal · 2016Article
- Age-specific haemosporidian infection dynamics and survival in Seychelles warblers.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- The oxidative cost of reproduction depends on early development oxidative stress and sex in a bird species.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2016Article
- Oxidative costs of reproduction: Oxidative stress in mice fed standard and low antioxidant diets.Physiology & behavior · 2016Article
- Article
- The oxidative costs of reproduction are group-size dependent in a wild cooperative breeder.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Parental effort is usually associated with high metabolism that could lead to an increase in the production of reactive oxidative species giving rise to oxidative stress. Since many antioxidants involved in the resistance to oxidative stress can also enhance immune function, an increase in parental effort may diminish the level of antioxidants otherwise involved in parasite resistance. In the present study, we performed brood size manipulation in a population of great tits (Parus major) to create different levels of parental effort. We measured resistance to oxidative stress and used a newly developed quantitative PCR assay to quantify malarial parasitaemia. We found that males with an enlarged brood had significantly higher level of malarial parasites and lower red blood cell resistance to free radicals than males rearing control and reduced broods. Brood size manipulation did not affect female parasitaemia, although females with an enlarged brood had lower red blood cell resistance than females with control and reduced broods. However, for both sexes, there was no relationship between the level of parasitaemia and resistance to oxidative stress, suggesting a twofold cost of reproduction. Our results thus suggest the presence of two proximate and independent mechanisms for the well-documented trade-off between current reproductive effort and parental survival.
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