ArticleBMC evolutionary biology2017
Age, pathogen exposure, but not maternal care shape offspring immunity in an insect with facultative family life.
Article in BMC evolutionary biology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Insect immunity in the Anthropocene.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Sublethal exposure to deltamethrin stimulates reproduction and has limited effects on post-hatching maternal care in the European earwig.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2021Article
- Infection of the Stable Fly,Frontiers in fungal biology · 2021Article
- Legacy of a Butterfly's Parental Microbiome in Offspring Performance.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2020Article
- Offspring reverse transcriptome responses to maternal deprivation when reared with pathogens in an insect with facultative family life.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Article
- Condition-Dependent Trade-Off Between Weapon Size and Immunity in Males of the European Earwig.Scientific reports · 2017Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
backgroundTo optimize their resistance against pathogen infection, individuals are expected to find the right balance between investing into the immune system and other life history traits. In vertebrates, several factors were shown to critically affect the direction of this balance, such as the developmental stage of an individual, its current risk of infection and/or its access to external help such as parental care. However, the independent and/or interactive effects of these factors on immunity remain poorly studied in insects.
resultsHere, we manipulated maternal presence and pathogen exposure in families of the European earwig Forficula auricularia to measure whether and how the survival rate and investment into two key immune parameters changed during offspring development. The pathogen was the entomopathogenic fungus Metarhizium brunneum and the immune parameters were hemocyte concentration and phenol/pro-phenoloxidase enzyme activity (total-PO). Our results surprisingly showed that maternal presence had no effect on offspring immunity, but reduced offspring survival. Pathogen exposure also lowered the survival of offspring during their early development. The concentration of hemocytes and the total-PO activity increased during development, to be eventually higher in adult females compared to adult males. Finally, pathogen exposure overall increased the concentration of hemocytes-but not the total-PO activity-in adults, while it had no effect on these measures in offspring.
conclusionsOur results show that, independent of their infection risk and developmental stage, maternal presence does not shape immune defense in young earwigs. This reveals that pathogen pressure is not a universal evolutionary driver of the emergence and maintenance of post-hatching maternal care in insects.
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