“…The demonstration that mounting an immune response in pacu is metabolically costly is in line with a previous study [3] showing prolonged elevation in oxygen consumption after vaccination, concomitantly with higher plasma antibody titer and lysozyme activity in this period. Studies have shown the effects of starvation on metabolic and endocrine responses [5,7e9] and on immune response of fish [5,8,10,11]; however, to our knowledge, only one study has focused on the effect of starvation on the immune responses triggered after bacterial exposure [5], as our study did.…”