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Mohammed, Ryan S., Reynolds, Michael, James, Joanna, Williams, Chris, Mohammed, Azad, Ramsubhag, Adesh, van Oosterhout, Cock 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5653-738X and Cable, Jo
(2016)
Getting into hot water:sick guppies frequent warmer thermal conditions.
Oecologia, 181 (3).
911–917.
ISSN 0029-8549
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Abstract
Ectotherms depend on the environmental temperature for thermoregulation and exploit thermal regimes that optimise physiological functioning. They may also frequent warmer conditions to up-regulate their immune response against parasite infection and/or impede parasite development. This adaptive response, known as ‘behavioural fever’, has been documented in various taxa including insects, reptiles and fish, but only in response to endoparasite infections. Here, a choice chamber experiment was used to investigate the thermal preferences of a tropical freshwater fish, the Trinidadian guppy (Poecilia reticulata), when infected with a common helminth ectoparasite Gyrodactylus turnbulli, in female-only and mixed-sex shoals. The temperature tolerance of G. turnbulli was also investigated by monitoring parasite population trajectories on guppies maintained at a continuous 18, 24 or 32 °C. Regardless of shoal composition, infected fish frequented the 32 °C choice chamber more often than when uninfected, significantly increasing their mean temperature preference. Parasites maintained continuously at 32 °C decreased to extinction within 3 days, whereas mean parasite abundance increased on hosts incubated at 18 and 24 °C. We show for the first time that gyrodactylid-infected fish have a preference for warmer waters and speculate that sick fish exploit the upper thermal tolerances of their parasites to self medicate.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | behavioural fever,climate change,gyrodactylus,thermal gradients,trinidadian guppy,sdg 13 - climate action ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/climate_action |
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Science > Research Centres > Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | Pure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 06 Apr 2016 11:00 |
| Last Modified: | 22 Oct 2022 00:59 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58146 |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s00442-016-3598-1 |
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