Flight performance of western sandpipers <i>Calidris mauri</i> remains uncompromised when mounting an acute phase immune response
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Migratory birds have been implicated in the spread of some zoonotic diseases, but how well infected individuals can fly remains poorly understood. We used western sandpipers, Calidris mauri, to experimentally test whether flight is affected when long-distance migrants are mounting an immune response and whether migrants maintain immune defences during a flight in a wind tunnel. We measured five indicators of innate immunity in 'flown-healthy' birds (flying in a wind tunnel without mounting an immune response), 'flown-sick' birds (flying while mounting an acute phase response, which is part of induced innate immunity), and a non-flying control group ('not-flown'). Voluntary flight duration did not differ between flown-healthy and flown-sick birds, indicating that mounting an acute phase response to simulated infection did not hamper an individual's ability to fly for up to 3 h. However, in comparison to not-flown birds, bacterial killing ability of plasma was significantly reduced after flight in flown-sick birds. In flown-healthy birds, voluntary flight duration was positively correlated with bacterial killing ability and baseline haptoglobin concentration of the blood plasma measured 1-3 weeks before experimental flights, suggesting that high quality birds had strong immune systems and greater flight capacity. Our findings indicate that flight performance is not diminished by prior immune challenge, but that flight while mounting an acute phase response negatively affects other aspects of immune function. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the transmission of avian diseases, as they suggest that birds can still migrate while fighting an infection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".