Sex biased immunity is driven by relative differences in reproductive investment

Gentlemen, brace yourselves, because you are more likely to get sick than your female counterparts – cough, cough, cough. At least that is what theory would have us believe in sexually selected species where males compete more than females for mates. Recent Ph.D. graduate Crystal Vincent (Gwynne and Baker labs) recently published a paper that provides a novel twist in testing this prediction. Crystal published “Sex biased immunity is driven by relative differences in reproductive investment” in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Series B. Using a species in which males make a large but variable parental investment in offspring, Crystal and Darryl use two indicators of immunity to show that when paternal investment in reproduction is experimentally increased, male immune investment becomes relatively greater than that of females. These results suggest that though females are often found to be more immunecompetent, the direction of sex-biased immunity is plastic and appears to track relative parental investment in offspring.

Congratulations on this exciting result, Crystal!