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Query: UMLS:C0038187 (starvation)
 24,951 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Four decades of observations on the limnology and fishes of Oneida Lake, New York, USA, provided an opportunity to investigate causes of mortality during winter, a period of resource scarcity for most juvenile fishes, in age-0 yellow perch (Perca flavescens) and age-0 white perch (Morone americana). This time series contains several environmental (e.g., winter severity) and biological (e.g., predator abundance) signals that can be used to disentangle multiple effects on overwinter mortality of these fishes. A multiple regression analysis indicated that age-0 yellow perch winter mortality was inversely related to fish length in autumn and to the abundance of alternative prey (gizzard shad [Dorosoma cepedianum] and white perch). However, no length-selective predation of yellow perch by one of the main predators, adult walleye (Sander vitreus), was detected. In contrast, white perch mortality was directly associated with total predator biomass and abundance of white perch in autumn, and inversely related to yellow perch abundance as a potential buffer species, but not to the abundance of gizzard shad. Winter severity was not a significant predictor of mortality for either perch species. Predicted winter starvation mortality, from a model described in the literature, was much lower than observed mortality for yellow perch. Similar models for white perch were correlated with observed mortality. These results collectively suggest that predation is the main mechanism shaping winter mortality of yellow perch, while both predation and starvation may be important for white perch. This analysis also revealed that gizzard shad buffer winter mortality of yellow perch. Although winter duration determines the northern limit of fish distributions, in mid-latitude Oneida Lake and for these species, predator-prey interactions seem to exert a greater influence on winter mortality than starvation.
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PMID:Gizzard shad put a freeze on winter mortality of age-0 yellow perch but not white perch. 1693 13

Energy storage is a common adaptation of fish living in seasonal environments. For some species, the energy accumulated during the growing season, and stored primarily as lipids, is crucial to preventing starvation mortality over winter. Thus, in order to understand the adaptive responses of fish life history to climate, it is important to determine how energy should be allocated to storage and how it trades off with the other body components that contribute to fitness. In this paper, we extend previous life history theory to include an explicit representation of how the seasonal allocation of energy to storage acts as a constraint on fish growth. We show that a strategy that privileges allocation to structural mass in the first part of the growing season and switches to storage allocation later on, as observed empirically in several fish species, is the strategy that maximizes growth efficiency and hence is expected to be favored by natural selection. Stochastic simulations within this theoretical framework demonstrate that the relative performance of this switching strategy is robust to a wide range of fluctuations in growing season length, and to moderate short-term (i.e., daily) fluctuations in energy intake and/or expenditure within the growing season. We then integrate this switching strategy with a biphasic growth modeling framework to predict typical growth rates of walleye Sander vitreus, a cool water species, and lake trout Salvelinus namaycush, a cold water specialist, across a climatic gradient in North America. As predicted, growth rates increased linearly with the duration of the growing season. Regression line intercepts were negative, indicating that growth can only occur when growing season length exceeds a threshold necessary to produce storage for winter survival. The model also reveals important differences between species, showing that observed growth rates of lake trout are systematically higher than those of walleye in relatively colder lakes. This systematic difference is consistent with both (i) the expected superior capacity of lake trout to withstand harsh winter conditions, and (ii) some degree of counter gradient adaptation of lake trout growth capacity to the climatic gradient covered by our data.
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PMID:Adaptive responses of energy storage and fish life histories to climatic gradients. 2399 84