Morphology, Habitat Use, and Life History

Abstract

Previous chapters have focused on progressively smaller scales in space and time, from global-continental-deep evolutionary phenomena to regional or local, extant phenomena, and have addressed factors like disturbance and stress that filter species for local habitats. This chapter addresses the morphology of individual species and the ways physical abilities of fishes interact with the variation in their habitat (both structural and hydraulic) to place species in particular microhabitats in a stream or lake. This chapter also addresses ways that morphology of fishes and environmental conditions in their habitats influence feeding, patch choice, movement, and migration, as well as reproduction, growth, mortality, and related life-history features. This chapter includes topics that seem superficially quite different, but all address the ways that the unique ecology of a given species (autecology), independent of other species, influences its presence or abundance in a local assemblage.

What the humming-birds are in our avifauna, the darters are among our fresh-water fishes. Minute, agile, beautiful, delighting in the clear, swift waters of rocky streams ... they do not seem to be dwarfed so much as concentrated fishes—each carrying in its little body all the activity, spirit, grace, complexity of detail and perfection of finish to be found in a perch or a wall-eyed pike.... They have taken refuge from their enemies in the rocky highlands where the free waters play in ceaseless torrents, and there they have wrested from stubborn nature a meagre living. Although diminished in size by their continual struggle with the elements, they have developed an activity and hardihood, a vigor of life and glow of high color....

—Stephen A. Forbes (1880b)

... the study of Himalayan fishes is also full of charm. It is for the reader to strive for and enjoy their beauty of structure and the remarkable way in which they perform their life functions.

—Sunder L. Hora (1952)