Sustained melatonin treatment blocks body mass, pelage, reproductive, and fever responses to short day lengths in female Siberian hamsters

Winter imposes physiological challenges on individuals including increased thermoregulatory demands, risk of infection, and decreased food availability. To survive these challenges, animals living outside the tropics must appropriately distribute their energetic costs across the year, including reproduction and immune function. Individuals of many species use the annual cycle of changing day lengths (photoperiod), which is encoded by the nightly duration of melatonin secretion, to adjust physiology. Siberian hamsters exposed to short days (SD) (long nights/prolonged endogenous melatonin secretion) enhance some aspects of immune function, but curtail other energetically expensive immune functions including the febrile response. The purpose of this study was twofold. First, we determined whether sustained melatonin treatment would inhibit the development of the SD phenotype in female hamsters as it does in males. Second, we examined whether the SD attenuation of fever would be blocked by continuous exposure to exogenous melatonin. Hamsters were implanted with melatonin or empty capsules, housed in either long days (LD) or SD for 8-9 weeks, and then challenged with lipopolysaccharide; body temperature and locomotor activity were recorded. Unlike hamsters with empty capsules, hamsters with melatonin implants did not respond to SD and maintained a LD phenotype including summer-like spleen, uterine and body masses, and pelage characteristics. Further, sustained melatonin treatment blocked the SD attenuation of febrile responses and prolonged the behavioral components of the sickness response. These results suggest that the daily fluctuations in endogenous melatonin may be masked by continuous exposure to exogenous melatonin, thus inhibiting functional photoperiodic responses to SD.