Abstract
This chapter is an inventory of basic digestive mechanisms and of how dietary sources determine the forms of the digestive tract of fishes and aquatic invertebrates. Due to high dietary quality and energy provision, carnivores have the shortest digestive tracts, whereas low dietary quality, low energy, but high fibre content, determine long intestines of herbivores. However, taken all ecological traits together, herbivory appears to be a successful, rather than disadvantageous nutritional strategy. The simple relationship of dietary source and intestine length possesses poor statistical significance and is, therefore, often questioned and apparent exceptions of this relationship are available. Nevertheless, ontogenetic changes of intestine length and morphology as well as seasonal changes of the intestine after dietary alterations support the hypothesis. One major reason for the poor significance of this relationship likely are coarse or even incorrect trophic classifications; consequently, this chapter presents selected examples that species classified as herbivores or carnivores are omnivores in reality – the omnivore’s dilemma. Omnivores have a rather flexible foraging strategy.
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Notes
- 1.
Zihler index (Zihler 1981) is the relation between gut length and body mass: gut length×(10 × bodymass1/3)−1
- 2.
Pyloric ceca are blind appendages attached to the proximal intestine of many fish. Buddington and Diamond (1987) provided evidence that ceca are an adaptation for increasing the intestinal surface area without increasing the length or thickness of the intestine itself.
- 3.
Applies to apomorphic (evolutionary advanced) features possessed by two or more taxa in common (Allaby 2015)
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Steinberg, C.E.W. (2018). Diets and Digestive Tracts – ‘Your Food Determines Your Intestine’. In: Aquatic Animal Nutrition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91767-2_2
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