Feeding Ecology of Fishes – A Mini Review

ABSTRACT: Fishes constitute more than half of the vertebrates, inhabiting almost every aquatic habitat of the world and form an inexpensive source of vital nutrients. The depletion of fishery stocks as a result of anthropogenic interferences is evident worldwide and mandates an urgent need to address the cause before rate of loss exceeds the limit. This makes the assessment of various aspects of fish, especially their feeding ecology quite imperative for developing conservation and management strategies. Food forms a vital factor for fishes required chiefly for growth and reproduction in fishes and its qualitative or quantitative variation is influenced by various biotic and abiotic factors. Amongst the various attributes influencing fishes, food and feeding constitute a vital aspect that impacts the growth and general wellbeing of the fish. Feeding ecology of a fish is directly linked to its population dynamics and helps in understanding of various aspects of fish like habitat preference, competition, prey selectivity, energy transfer etc. Under this backdrop the current review was drafted to acquire knowledge about the three major aspects of feeding ecology of fish i.e., analysis of the gut contents, feeding biology and prey selectivity. The analysis of gut contents helps to identify the prey diversity and abundance consumed by a fish. Feeding biology helps to evaluate the acceptability of the prey by depicting the correlation between biology of the fish and its food preferences. Prey selectivity deals with the evaluation of prey choice depicting the reason behind choice of one prey over the other.  Keywords: Conservation, Gut content analysis, Prey selectivity, Abiotic factors