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Context dependency and generality of fever in insects

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Abstract

Fever can reduce mortality in infected animals. Yet, despite its fitness-enhancing qualities, fever often varies among animals. We used several approaches to examine this variation in insects. Texas field crickets (Gryllus texensis) exhibited a modest fever (1 °C increase in preferred body temperature, T pref) after injection of prostaglandin, which putatively mediates fever in both vertebrates and invertebrates, but they did not exhibit fever during chronic exposure to heat-killed bacteria. Further, chronic food limitation and mating status did not affect T pref or the expression of behavioural fever, suggesting limited context dependency of fever in G. texensis. Our meta-analysis of behavioural fever studies indicated that behavioural fever occurs in many insects, but it is not ubiquitous. Thus, both empirical and meta-analytical results suggest that the fever response in insects ‘is widespread, although certainly not inevitable’ (Moore 2002). We highlight the need for future work focusing on standardizing an experimental protocol to measure behavioural fever, understanding the specific mechanism(s) underlying fever in insects, and examining whether ecological or physiological costs often outweigh the benefits of fever and can explain the sporadic nature of fever in insects.

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Acknowledgments

We appreciate the funding support by the Killam Trusts Foundation (to Z.R.S. and S.A.A.) and the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (to S.A.A.), and Madison Acker, Jillian Baker, and Robbin McKee for the assistance. We thank three anonymous reviewers for the helpful feedback on the paper.

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  1. Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

    Z. R. Stahlschmidt & S. A. Adamo

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  1. Z. R. Stahlschmidt
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  2. S. A. Adamo
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Correspondence to Z. R. Stahlschmidt.

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Communicated by: Sven Thatje

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Stahlschmidt, Z.R., Adamo, S.A. Context dependency and generality of fever in insects. Naturwissenschaften 100, 691–696 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-013-1057-y

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