Diet-tissue discrimination factors of three neotropical freshwater fishes and a comparison of the trophic position

Abstract

The trophic discrimination factor (TDF) is a key parameter for stable isotope analysis and due to a lack of species-specific TDFs, mean universal values have been used, resulting in uncertainties about the trophic position of species and a call for more experiments. In this study, we have addressed the lack of experimental species-specific TDFs conducting three experiments of 128 days each to determine the TDF (muscle and liver) of three species, the piscivore Pseudoplatystoma corruscans (Spix & Agassiz, 1829), and the omnivores Piaractus mesopotamicus (Holmberg, 1887) and Astyanax lacustris (Lütken, 1875), tropical fishes native to the La Plata River basin. Then, we calculated the trophic position (TP) using the mean universal TDF from literature and the species-specific TDF produced in this study for Pseudoplatystoma corruscans. We estimated the TDFs for the three species through experiment and the values found differed from the mean universal TDF in the literature. Moreover, the TP was lower when using the species-specific TDFs. The TP is important for several analyses, including its use in functional diversity. Therefore, we recommend using species-specific TDF values for calculating TP once it differs from the results calculated with mean universal TDF.

Keywords

• Discrimination factor
• trophic guilds
• stable isotope ecology
• stable isotope experiment
• isotope fractionation
• turnover rate