With over 30,000 species, fishes are the most abundant and diverse vertebrates on the planet. This new edition of the textbook ‘The Physiology of Fishes’ explores and explains how fish work, how they adapt and thrive in such a wide range of habitats on earth, and how global change may affect their continued success. Dr Tommy Norin, a researcher at the Centre for Ocean Life, has contributed with a chapter on fish metabolism.
All living things, including fishes, must harness energy and materials from their environment in order to maintain homeostasis, grow, and reproduce. Metabolism is the sum of the chemical reactions within the body that convert food to energy molecules and building blocks for growth, and which use these compounds to sustain the cellular energy demands that support life. To thrive, organisms must modulate their rates of energy supply to match varying energy demands, or vice versa. This energy turnover is metabolic rate, which is most easily thought of as the amount of energy used by an animal per unit of time. Metabolic rate determines an animal’s demands for environmental resources and its capacities for biological activities. Consequently, metabolic rate fundamentally influences the ecology and evolution of animals and their responses to environmental change.
The book is scheduled to be released on 8 September and can be found here.
Norin T & Speers-Roesch B (2020) Metabolism. In The Physiology of Fishes, 5th ed. (Currie S & Evans DH, Eds.). CRC Press, Boca Raton, USA. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781003036401.