Approaches to Understanding Fish Growth

Abstract
At the organismic (whole-fish) level, fish growth has the property of “plasticity”; that is, it can display considerable intraspecific variation in response to differences in such factors as temperature and food supply. Growth can also be investigated at any of a series of increasingly more reductionist levels of biological organization. My work on rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss includes growth studies of whole fish, the relative (allometric) growth of organs and tissues and of protein and lipid contents of the body, and the influence of white muscle fiber growth on whole-body growth rate and maximum body size, These studies show that patterns of growth are conserved despite major differences in organismic growth rate.

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