Meeting Abstract

S4.1-1  Sunday, Jan. 5 08:00  How radio telemetry and radio frequency identification can help link individual immune responses and disease dynamics in wild animals ADELMAN, JS; Virginia Tech adelmanj@vt.edu

Revealing how immunological variation influences pathogen transmission is a fundamental and unifying challenge in disease ecology and ecoimmunology. To meet this challenge, researchers must choose their metrics of immune defense carefully, favoring those most relevant to the pathogens a host faces. Fever and sickness behaviors, including lethargy and anorexia, are whole-organism responses to diverse types of infection, integrating myriad inflammatory immunological signals and processes. As such, the accurate measurement of these responses can help us understand both the benefits and dangers of inflammatory immune defenses (e.g. pathogen clearance versus the potential for immunopathology). Moreover, both anorexia and lethargy can be measured remotely with radio telemetry or radio frequency identification, enabling data collection at fine temporal scales while minimizing handling of animals, the number of captures required, and time in captivity. In this presentation, I will review recent applications of these remote monitoring technologies in ecoimmunology studies, focusing on insights into within-host disease dynamics. I will also propose extended uses of these technologies to directly link variation in responses to infection with pathogen transmission in natural disease systems.