Abstract
The amount of biomass production per unit of food consumed (P/Q) represents an important quantity in ecosystem functioning, because it indicates how efficient a population transforms ingested food into biomass. Several investigations have noticed that P/Q remains relatively constant (or invariant) across fish population that feed at the same food-type level (carnivorous/herbivorous). Nevertheless, theoretical explanation for this invariant is still lacking. In this paper, we demonstrate that P/Q remains invariant across fish populations with stable-age distribution. Three key assumptions underpin the P/Q invariant: (1) the ratio between natural mortality M and von Bertalanffy growth parameter k (M/k ratio) should remain invariant across fish populations; (2) a parameter defining the fraction of ingested food available for growth needs to remain constant across fish that feed at the same trophic level; (3) third, the ratio between length at age 0 (\(l_0\)) and asymptotic length (\(l_\infty\)) should be constant across fish populations. The influence of these assumptions on the P/Q estimates were numerically assessed considering fish populations of different lifespan. Numerical evaluations show that the most critical condition highly relates to the first assumption, M/k. Results are discussed in the context of the reliability of the required assumption to consider the P/Q invariant in stable-age distributed fish populations.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. R. Wiff was supported by CONICYT (Chile) scholarship for postgraduate studies abroad (“Beca Presidente de la Republica para Estudios de Postgrado en el Extranjero”) by CONICYT/FONDECYT post doctoral Project Number 3130425, and by CAPES project FONDECYT Number FB 0002 (2014). AM Segura thanks ANII for the Grant FCE_3_2013_1_100394.
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Wiff, R., Barrientos, M.A., Segura, A.M. et al. The invariance of production per unit of food consumed in fish populations. Theory Biosci. 136, 179–185 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-017-0241-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-017-0241-6