Contribution to some aspects of the digestive tract anatomy and food evacuation of the Pacific fat sleeper Dormitator latrifrons

Abstract

The development of feeding protocols and the study of gastric evacuation or passage of food through the digestive tract is essential to generate information on the digestive physiology of organisms, as they help to quantify the daily ration to avoid any poor diet. In this sense, the present work aims to demonstrate some basic aspects of the fish Dormitator latifrons digestive physiology by evaluating the transit of food through the intestinal tract as a function of time. In a completely randomized standard design, juveniles of D. latifrons were fed ad libitum with commercial pellets. Five conditioned organisms were sacrificed every hour after a single feeding. The food bolus was collected at each sampling point, using polynomial regression models to analyze the passage of food through time in the digestive tract. The passage of food showed a nonlinear behavior in time, being the simple exponential decay model of two parameters (R2 = 0.630; P < 0.0001) the best to explain the evacuation of food through the digestive tract. This knowledge will generate better feeding protocols for this species with commercial importance and aquaculture potential.