Dietary-morphological relationships in fish assemblages of small forested streams in the Bolivian Amazon

Abstract

We explored the relationships between diet and morphology in 30 fish species from forested tropical streams of the Bolivian Amazon. These species were first assigned to eight broad trophic guilds based on stomach contents analysis. The relationships between diet and morphology were then examined using Redundancy Analysis, after having checked for potential phylogenetical effects. Results show that, independently of any phylogenetic constraints, some of the trophic guilds could be grossly predicted from few relevant morphological attributes (i.e. relative intestinal length, standard length and mouth orientation) and thus suggest a significant link between diet and morphology. In other words, species having similar diet tend to converge to some extent on some morphological attributes. This link was nevertheless rather weak, suggesting that even if morphology may set limits to patterns of resource use, these limits are broad enough to allow fishes changing their choice of prey resources to respond to local biotic and/or abiotic conditions.