ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
The impacts of body mass on immune cell concentrations in birds.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Characterization of avian β-defensin genes in Galliformes reveals widespread evolutionary diversification and distinct evolutionary relationships with infection risk.BMC genomics · 2025Article
- The Promise of a Pointillist Perspective for Comparative Immunology.Physiology (Bethesda, Md.) · 2024Review
- Revealing endogenous conditions for Peto's paradox via an ordinary differential equation model.Journal of mathematical biology · 2024Article
- Bacterial sepsis triggers stronger transcriptomic immune responses in larger primates.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Seasonal changes in diet, immune function, and oxidative stress in three passerines inhabiting a Mediterranean climate.Oecologia · 2023Article
- Evolutionary trade-off between innate and acquired immune defences in birds.Frontiers in zoology · 2023Article
- Body Size Poorly Predicts Host-Associated Microbial Diversity in Wild Birds.Microbiology spectrum · 2023Article
- Phylogeographic Patterns of Haemoproteid Assemblages of Selected Avian Hosts: Ecological and Evolutionary Implications.Microorganisms · 2022Article
- Host foraging behavior and nest type influence prevalence of avian haemosporidian parasites in the Pantanal.Parasitology research · 2022Article
- The impacts of body mass on immune cell concentrations in birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Body mass affects many biological traits, but its impacts on immune defences are fairly unknown. Recent research on mammals found that neutrophil concentrations disproportionately increased (scaled hypermetrically) with body mass, a result not predicted by any existing theory. Although the scaling relationship for mammals might predict how leucocyte concentrations scale with body mass in other vertebrates, vertebrate classes are distinct in many ways that might affect their current and historic interactions with parasites and hence the evolution of their immune systems. Subsequently, here, we asked which existing scaling hypothesis best-predicts relationships between body mass and lymphocyte, eosinophil and heterophil concentrations-the avian functional equivalent of neutrophils-among more than 100 species of birds. We then examined the predictive power of body mass relative to life-history variation, as extensive literature indicates that the timing of key life events has influenced immune system variation among species. Finally, we ask whether avian scaling patterns differ from the patterns we observed in mammals. We found that an intercept-only model best explained lymphocyte and eosinophil concentrations among birds, indicating that the concentrations of these cell types were both independent of body mass. For heterophils, however, body mass explained 31% of the variation in concentrations among species, much more than life-history variation (4%). As with mammalian neutrophils, avian heterophils scaled hypermetrically (
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