ArticleReviews in fish biology and fisheries2024
Diet and habitat as determinants of intestine length in fishes.
Article in Reviews in fish biology and fisheries, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Genome-Wide Association Analysis for Growth-Related Traits in Indoor- and Outdoor-Cultured Juvenile Grass Carp (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
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- Gastrointestinal microbiota of sympatric pipefish (Syngnathus typhle) and stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) indicate trade-off associated with evolutionary stomach loss.BMC ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Hybridization-Driven Herbivorous Adaptation in Fish: Morphological, Digestive, Transcriptome, and Microbial Evidence from a Hybrid ofInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2026Article
- Amphibian Intestine Allometry.Journal of morphology · 2026Article
- Analysis ofAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Habitat-specific temporal variation in the pace of fish diversification.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Comparative performance of traditional and commercial DNA extraction methods for fish gut microbiota analysis.Molecular biology reports · 2026Article
- Nitrogen excretion and oxygen consumption under severe hypoxia in siluriform fishes from the Amazon.Journal of fish biology · 2026Article
- Alimentary Tract Anatomy and Morphology in Early Adult Mediterranean KillifishAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Autonomic neural control of motor activity in the intestine of freshwater barramundi (Lates calcarifer).Cell and tissue research · 2026Article
- Spatial variation and individual specialization of stickleback diet in relation to trophic morphology.Aquatic ecology · 2026Article
- Multi-omics interrogation of herbivorous phenotype acquisition in hybrid culter under a 30% crude protein diet.BMC genomics · 2025Article
- A Metagenomic Analysis of Gut Microbiome and Growth Performance of Giant Gourami (Osphronemus goramy) Fed with Raw Plant-Based Diet.Marine biotechnology (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Diet shifts alter the activity and distribution of digestive enzymes in an herbivorous fish.Fish physiology and biochemistry · 2025Article
- Variable phylosymbiosis and cophylogeny patterns in wild fish gut microbiota of a large subtropical river.mSphere · 2025Article
- Quercetin Supplementation Improves Intestinal Digestive and Absorptive Functions and Microbiota in Rats Fed Protein-Oxidized Soybean Meal: Transcriptomics and Microbiomics Insights.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
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8 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Fish biologists have long assumed a link between intestinal length and diet, and relative gut length or Zihler's index are often used to classify species into trophic groups. This has been done for specific fish taxa or specific ecosystems, but not for a global fish dataset. Here, we assess these relationships across a dataset of 468 fish species (254 marine, 191 freshwater, and 23 that occupy both habitats) in relation to body mass and fish length. Herbivores had significantly relatively stouter bodies and longer intestines than omni- and faunivores. Among faunivores, corallivores had longer intestines than invertivores, with piscivores having the shortest. There were no detectable differences between herbivore groups, possibly due to insufficient understanding of herbivorous fish diets. We propose that reasons for long intestines in fish include (i) difficult-to-digest items that require a symbiotic microbiome, and (ii) the dilution of easily digestible compounds with indigestible material (e.g., sand, wood, exoskeleton). Intestinal indices differed significantly between dietary groups, but there was substantial group overlap. Counter-intuitively, in the largest dataset, marine species had significantly shorter intestines than freshwater fish. These results put fish together with mammals as vertebrate taxa with clear convergence in intestine length in association with trophic level, in contrast to reptiles and birds, even if the peculiar feeding ecology of herbivorous fish is probably more varied than that of mammalian herbivores. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11160-024-09853-3.
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