Macronutrient intake and simulated infection threat independently affect
life history traits of male decorated crickets
Abstract
Nutritional geometry has advanced our understanding of how
macronutrients (e.g., proteins and carbohydrates) influence the
expression of life history traits and their corresponding trade-offs.
For example, recent work has revealed that reproduction and immune
function in male decorated crickets are optimized at very different
protein:carbohydrate (P:C) dietary ratios. However, it is unclear how an
individual’s macronutrient intake interacts with its perceived infection
status to determine investment in reproduction or other key life history
traits. Here, we employed a fully factorial design in which calling
effort and immune function were quantified for male crickets fed either
diets previously demonstrated to maximize calling effort (P:C = 1:8) or
immune function (P:C = 5:1), and then administered a treatment from a
spectrum of increasing infection cue intensity using heat-killed
bacteria. Both diet and a simulated infection threat independently
influenced the survival, immunity, and reproductive effort of males. If
they called, males increased calling effort at the low infection cue
dose, consistent with the terminal investment hypothesis, but
interpretation of responses at the higher threat levels was hampered by
the differential mortality of males across infection cue and diet
treatments. A high protein, low carbohydrate diet severely reduced the
health, survival, and overall fitness of male crickets. There was,
however, no evidence of an interaction between diet and infection cue
dose on calling effort, suggesting that the threshold for terminal
investment was not contingent on diet as investigated here.