The Role of Metabolic Phenotype in the Capacity to Balance Competing Energetic Demands.

AbstractGiven the critical role of metabolism in the life history of all organisms, there is particular interest in understanding the relationship between individual metabolic phenotypes and the capacity to partition energy into competing life history traits. Such relationships could be predictive of individual phenotypic performances throughout life. Here, we were specifically interested in whether an individual fish's metabolic phenotype can shape its propensity to feed following a significant stressor (2-min exhaustive exercise challenge).

Impairment of branchial and coronary blood flow reduces reproductive fitness, but not cardiac performance in paternal smallmouth bass (Micropterus dolomieu).

The capacity to extract oxygen from the water, and the ability of the heart to drive tissue oxygen transport, are fundamental determinants of important life-history performance traits in fish. Cardiac performance is in turn dependent on the heart's own oxygen supply, which in some teleost species is partly delivered via a coronary circulation originating directly from the gills that perfuses the heart, and is crucial for cardiac, metabolic and locomotory capacities. It is currently unknown, however, how a compromised branchial blood flow (e.