Abstract: Keynote talk in the Symposium 'HOST-PARASITE INTERACTIONS IN SEABIRDS: EVOLUTIONARY ECOLOGY AND ECO-EPIDEMIOLOGICAL ISSUES' (organized by Thierry BOULINIER & Sarah BURTHE) of the 2nd World Seabird Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, October 2015.
Abstract: Birds have been key species for the study of the immune system of vertebrates. B lymphocytes, which are responsible for the production of antibodies, have for instance taken their name from the ‘Bursa of Fabritius’ of chickens. But birds are not only chickens and comparative approaches of the immune system of particular species such as seabirds may reveal insight of relevance for evolutionary ecology, eco-epidemiology and biomedicine. Here we report results of field studies on the temporal persistence of maternal antibodies in seabird nestlings. Maternal antibodies transferred to the newborn are expected to play various roles and they may reveal how evolution has shaped the persistence of antibodies. The temporal persistence of those antibodies has recently been shown to last more than several weeks post-hatching in the Cory’s shearwater, a long lived Procelariiform species which displays a long chick rearing period. In order to explore further to what extent species differ in the persistence of maternal antibodies, we implemented comparable transgenerational vaccination experiments in a set of seabird species. Our result show that the rate of decay of antibodies against a vaccine was also slow in two other Procelariiform species, notably the European storm petrel, but that it did not differ from what was known for quail and chickens (half-lives of about 5 days) for a set of seabird species from other taxa. These results call for further work on the evolutionary ecology of this immunological trait, which could have implications in biomedicine but also for conservation.