Food habits in freshwater fish: A review on studies in Brazilian floodplain

Abstract

In seasonally flooded environments, the dietary habits demonstrated by the fish community reflect the availability of resources in the environment and the adaptability of species to environmental conditions. In this sense, this work presents a review on the main methods adopted to analyze the diet of fish assemblages in floodplains of Brazilian rivers, as well as a review of dietary habits, trophic plasticity and the effect of seasonality on the diet. The evaluation of the diet of the fish species in these environments can be carried out from different methodologies of analysis of the stomach contents and indices obtained from these results. In order to evaluate the most used procedures in the analysis of natural fish feeding data by researchers in the area, a bibliographic review and a survey of articles published between 1990 and 2018 were carried out. One of the most frequent methods was the volumetric and most publications did not employ indexes. In addition, the information obtained from studies on the diet of the fish that inhabit the floodplains showed wide food plasticity, which may be due to spatial and temporal variations that alter the structure and dynamics of fish assemblages, leading to a large versatility in the exploitation of food resources.