Morphological and functional analyses of collected hemocytes were performed on a BD FACSverse flow cytometer (BD Biosciences, France). Hemocyte mortality was assessed according to Haberkorn et al. (2010) and expressed as the percentage of dead cells present in each sample. The concentration of circulating hemocytes (all hemocytes, granulocytes and hyalinocytes) was also determined. Phagocytosis activity was calculated as the percentage of hemocytes
that ingested three fluorescent beads or more (¼active hemocytes), while phagocytosis capacity was estimated as the
average number of beads engulfed by active hemocytes (Hegaret et al., 2003). ROS production was measured using a DCFH-DA assay as described in Lambert et al. (2003) and was expressed as the mean geometric fluorescence (in arbitrary units, A.U.).