DOI: 10.5061/dryad.sp12j6q
title: Data from: Social context affects thermoregulation but not activity level during avian immune response

description: Determining how an animal’s social context alters its immune responses
 will help us understand how pathogens impact individual health and spread
 within groups. Several studies have shown that group-housed animals can
 suppress components of the acute phase immune response, specifically
 sickness behaviors like lethargy. However, we do not know whether
 individuals alter sickness behaviors or other components of the acute
 phase response, including thermoregulation, in response to the infection
 status of other group members. We used automated radio telemetry on
 captive house sparrows (Passer domesticus) to test whether sickness
 behaviors and thermoregulation differed during immune challenge under 2
 social contexts: 1) all of the flock inoculated with lipopolysaccharide
 (LPS), a non-replicating component of gram-negative bacterial cell walls,
 or 2) half of the flock inoculated. We predicted that with half of the
 flock inoculated, LPS-treated birds would be under more pressure to
 maintain competitive behaviors, so would suppress components of the acute
 phase response. As we predicted, LPS-inoculated birds showed less
 pronounced heterothermia (fever) when housed with a mixture of inoculated
 and healthy flockmates. In contrast, LPS-inoculated birds exhibited
 similar degrees of lethargy regardless of the infection status of their
 flockmates. Our results show that the infection status of an individual’s
 social group did exert an effect on the acute phase response but
 surprisingly did not impact the expression of lethargy, a canonical
 sickness behavior. Determining the mechanisms underlying these responses
 will require testing additional social contexts with different ratios of
 infected to uninfected birds.
description: Vaziri_etal_2018_clean_data_ready_for_analysisPlease see README for variable descriptionsVaziri_etal_2018_raw_temp_activity_dataPlease see README for variable descriptionsVaziri_etal_2018_cleaning_raw_temp_activity_dataR script that converts 'Vaziri_etal_2018_raw_temp_activity_data.csv' into 'Vaziri_etal_2018_clean_data_ready_for_analysis.csv'Vaziri_etal_2018_activity_gammsR script that analyzes activity data using general additive mixed models (GAMMs) and produces the 'Vaziri_etal_2018_data_for_activity_figure.csv' file.Vaziri_etal_2018_data_for_activity_figurePlease see README for variable descriptionsVaziri_etal_2018_activity_figR script to produce activity figure.Vaziri_etal_2018_data_cleaning_for_fanovaPlease see Vaziri_etal_2018_README_data_for_TEMPERATURE.txt for instructions on use of code, datafiles to be imported, and datafiles produced by code.Vaziri_etal_2018_density_AT-MC-MTPlease see Vaziri_etal_2018_README_data_for_TEMPERATURE.txtVaziri_etal_2018_density_AT-MCPlease see Vaziri_etal_2018_README_data_for_TEMPERATURE.txt.Vaziri_etal_2018_density_AT-MTPlease see Vaziri_etal_2018_README_data_for_TEMPERATURE.txtVaziri_etal_2018_density_MC-MTPlease see Vaziri_etal_2018_README_data_for_TEMPERATURE.txtVaziri_etal_2018_repdat_ATPlease see Vaziri_etal_2018_README_data_for_TEMPERATURE.txtVaziri_etal_2018_repdat_MCPlease see Vaziri_etal_2018_README_data_for_TEMPERATURE.txtVaziri_etal_2018_repdat_MTPlease see Vaziri_etal_2018_README_data_for_TEMPERATURE.txtVaziri_etal_2018_temp_by_min_rawdataPlease see Vaziri_etal_2018_README_data_for_TEMPERATURE.txtVaziri_etal_2018_fanova_and_figures_TEMPERATURER script that produces the colored band plots and resampling curves that appear in the paper. Please see Vaziri_etal_2018_README_data_for_TEMPERATURE.txt