Abstract
Species specificity of taste preferences supposes the ability of fish to consume food with particular taste and thus minimize feeding competition while sympatry. However, the problem of the extent to which taste preferences can be related to trophic category and phylogeny of fish has not been yet resolved. We evaluated the taste preferences in Mozambique tilapia Oreochromis mossambicus for 37 substances (amino acids, sugars, basic taste substances) that we used earlier in experiments with the Nile tilapia O. niloticus. In O. mossambicus, taste attractive substances are the least numerous (4) and substances with an indifferent taste predominate (25). In O. niloticus, the numbers of taste attractive and indifferent substances are nearly equal (20 and 17), while substances with repulsive taste were not found. The difference between these facultative phytophagous fish is most noticeable for sugars palatability: in O. mossambicus none of the sugars have attractive taste, and 6 of them evoke aversive responses. In opposite, 9 of sugars have attractive taste, while others are indifferent, and none of sugars decrease ingestion of flavoured agar pellets in O. niloticus. Nevertheless, many substances are arranged in a similar order in the rows ranked by palatability for these fish. The patterns of feeding behavior are almost the same in tilapias. The study highlights that the phylogenetic proximity and similarity in the trophic category does not lead to the similarity of fish taste preferences. Most probably, feeding competition in the historical past is the main force that triggers the divergence in fish taste system functionality.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are sincerely grateful to Lasar R. Taufik (“Craft Tau” Limited) for providing Mozambique tilapia and to Eugene Marusov and Elena Mikhailova (MSU) for assistance with fish maintenance and for productive discussion of the results.
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The research was funded by the Russian Science Foundation, grant number 22-24-00125, https://rscf.ru/en/project/22-24-00125/ (accessed on 14 January 2022).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, experiments and data analysis were performed by AL. The first draft of the manuscript was written by AK and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Kasumyan, A., Levina, A. Are the taste preferences similar in closely related fish of the same trophic category? A case of Nile and Mozambique tilapias. Rev Fish Biol Fisheries 33, 1371–1386 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11160-023-09763-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11160-023-09763-w