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The effects of diet and caloric restriction on adipose tissue fatty acid signatures of tufted puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) nestlings

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Abstract

Fatty acid (FA) signature analysis is a powerful tool to investigate foraging ecology and food web dynamics in marine ecosystems. However, use of FA signatures to qualitatively or quantitatively infer diets is potentially complicated by effects of nutritional state on lipid metabolism. Estimation of diets using the quantitative fatty acid signature analysis (QFASA) model requires the use of calibration coefficients to account for predator metabolism of individual FAs. We conducted a captive feeding experiment to determine the effects of a 50% reduction in food intake on growth rate and adipose tissue FA signatures of tufted puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) nestlings, a species that routinely experiences food restriction during growth. FA signatures of chicks fed low- and high-calorie diets both exhibited a change in composition in response to the dietary shift with the direction of change in the composition of individual FAs matching the direction of change in the dietary FAs. Despite a growth rate in the restricted nestlings that was 38% of those in the well-fed group, rates of FA turnover were not different between high and low-calorie treatments, and turnover was close to, but not entirely complete, after 27 days on both high-calorie and restricted diets. FA signatures of tufted puffin nestlings were significantly affected by caloric restriction, but these effects were much less pronounced than those of dietary turnover, and calibration coefficients of puffins fed low and high-calorie diets were highly correlated. Our results demonstrate that changes in physiological state can affect FA metabolism, but future research is required to better understand whether the size of these effects is sufficient to substantially alter diet estimation using the QFASA model.

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Acknowledgments

Funding was provided by the North Pacific Research Board (NPRB #04-13) to CLB and CTW and by NOAA/NMFS (NA16FX1270) to CLB. Additional financial support was provided to CTW by AK EPSCoR, and to SJI by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Canada. We thank T. Cooper, R. Orben, S. Runck and E. Whidden for assistance with field and laboratory work. We are grateful to S. Al-Shaghay and S. Lang for assistance with FA signature analysis. We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. All procedures were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (#05-43) and authorized under state and federal permits.

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  1. Cory T. Williams

    Present address: Department of Biology, University of Alaska Southeast, Juneau, AK, 99801, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, 99775, USA

    Cory T. Williams

  2. Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, B3H 4JI, Canada

    Sara J. Iverson

  3. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, AK, 99508, USA

    C. Loren Buck

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  1. Cory T. Williams
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  2. Sara J. Iverson
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  3. C. Loren Buck
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Correspondence to Cory T. Williams.

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Communicated by G. Heldmaier.

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Williams, C.T., Iverson, S.J. & Buck, C.L. The effects of diet and caloric restriction on adipose tissue fatty acid signatures of tufted puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) nestlings. J Comp Physiol B 179, 711–720 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00360-009-0354-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00360-009-0354-4

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