Fish face a trade-off between 'eating big' for growth efficiency and 'eating small' to retain aerobic capacity.

ABSTRACT: Feeding provides the necessary energy to fuel all fitness-related processes including activity, growth and reproduction. Nevertheless, prey consumption and digestive processes can have physical and physiological trade-offs with other critical functions, many of which are not clearly understood. Using an ambush predator, barramundi (Lates calcarifer), fed meals ranging 0.6-3.4% of body mass, we examined interrelations between meal size, growth efficiency and surplus aerobic metabolic capacity (aerobic scope, AS). Large meals required a greater absolute investment of energy to process (a larger so-called specific dynamic action, SDA), but the percentage of digestible meal energy required in the SDA response (SDA coefficient) decreased with increasing meal size. Combined with the findings tha

SUBMITTER: Norin T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5627169 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature