Spatial Learning under immune challenge and dietary restriction in the subterranean rodent Ctenomys talarum.

SCHLEICH, CRISTIAN; ZENUTO, ROXANA; CUTRERA, ANA PAULA

Belfast

Congreso; 11th International Mammalogical Congress; 2013

International Federation of Mammalogists and The Mammal Society

Several lines of evidence suggest that learning and triggering an immune response are both metabolically expensive and thus likely to be subject of nutritional trade-offs between them and other competing demands. Therefore, we evaluated if an immune challenge with a novel antigen affects spatial learning in the subterranean rodent Ctenomys talarum under two different dietary conditions. The results showed that immune-challenged animals were affected in their spatial learning capabilities, increasing the number of errors (GLM, n=47, F=4.85, p=0.032) and marginally the latency (GLM, n=47, F=3.34, p=0.07) to reach the goal of a complex labyrinth. No effect of the dietary restriction (latency p=0.43, errors p=0.11) nor interaction between factors were observed (latency p=0.86, errors p=0.95). This work provides support for the existence of a trade-off between the costs of the immune defense and learning abilities, while absence of effect of nutritional condition on this trade-off suggests that the relationship among these factors is more complex than supposed.