KINEMATICS OF FEEDING IN BLUEGILL SUNFISH - IS THERE A GENERAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN AQUATIC CAPTURE AND TRANSPORT BEHAVIORS

Despite numerous studies of food transport in terrestrial vertebrates, little is known about this aspect of the feeding repertoire in aquati c vertebrates. Previous work had predicted that the kinematics of aqua tic prey capture by suction feeding should be similar to those of prey transport, However, recent analyses of aquatic prey capture and trans port in the tiger salamander Ambystoma tigrinum have contradicted this hypothesis, and document numerous differences between these two behav iors, In this study, using high-speed video and statistical analyses, we compare prey capture and transport kinematics in a ray-finned fish (Lepomis macrochirus, the bluegill sunfish) to examine the generality of differences between capture and transport behaviors in aquatic vert ebrates, Compared with prey capture, prey transport is significantly m ore rapid and tends to have reduced lower jaw excursions, while having similar hyoid movements, A nested analysis of variance was used to an alyze six variables common to both this analysis of lepomis macrochiru s and a previous study of Ambystoma tigrinum; none of these six variab les showed significant variation between taxa. These results indicate that aquatic prey transport is kinematically distinct from capture beh avior and that the distinctions between these two behaviors are remark ably consistent in two phylogenetically divergent lower vertebrate tax a, Such consistent kinematic differences have not been found in amniot e taxa studied to date, but may constitute a plesiomorphic feature of vertebrate feeding systems.