I was interviewed for the October edition of Practical Fishkeeping magazine “Do catfishes need to eat wood?”. You can link to an image here, although you can’t read the actual article unless you purchase a subscription.
They asked me some questions:
Which catfish groups
have been observed eating wood?
What happens to these
when they are fed wood?
Can they digest it?
Are they really eaters
of wood, or do they consume it while grazing other foods?
Some manufacturers are
adding lignin to catfish foods.
Is there
any point in doing so?
What should
wood-eating loricariids be fed?
I would like to thank Matt Clarke for contacting me for the interview. It is nice that someone read my work. And, PFK is a first-rate aquarium mag and the interview spread looks great.
You
can read my answers (as I wrote them) here. If
you read the PFK article, you will see
that some editorial changes were made to my answers making them more
definitive
than I originally worded them. And,
I
NEVER called myself a “world expert” in anything. That
was their doing.
I would like to respond to some of the criticisms that have popped up on pleco enthusiast websites. Of course, if one is interested in more of the complete picture of my research on wood-eating catfish, I ask that you read my articles (go to my pubs page), not the “bites” presented in an interview.
The first point I would like to make is that I DO NOT like the title of the interview. "Do catfishes need to eat wood?" I would answer that question differently than those that they asked. If you read my articles, you will see that the fish do indeed ingest wood in the wild, and this is very much part of their natural niche. So, I would rather ask the question: Can wood-eating catfishes digest wood? I think that the answer to the question "Do they NEED to EAT wood" may actually be "yes", because that is what they do in nature. What they get nutritionally from the wood is a different question altogether (see below).
Second,
I am not an
aquarist.
I do have three aquaria at
home—an 80-gallon tank with wild-caught fish from Florida
(including Florida
Flag Fish, Mosquito Fish, Platys, Bluegill Sunfish, a minnow species I
haven’t
keyed out yet, a Pt.
disjunctivus
captured near Orlando, and a P.
nigrolineatus purchased from a
wholesaler); a 20-gallon tank (which houses
a Green Terror Cichlid and a Hypostomus
sp.);
and a 10-gallon tank (which houses a Long-eared Sunfish that I captured
in
Alabama)—but I am not a hardcore aquarium hobbyist.
Rather,
I am a biologist that studies wild
fish in an evolutionary context and attempts to figure out how fish eat
and
digest what they do in the wild, not how to best keep them in captivity. Obviously,
I had to house fish in aquaria for
feeding trials during my graduate career, and I did this in aquarium
laboratories
at CSU Fullerton (for the study of digestion in prickleback fishes) and
at University
of Florida (for the study of digestion in loricariid catfishes). But,
this does not make me an expert
“aquarist”.
For example, I say nothing
about feeding Panaque
carrots in the
PFK article, but I know my P.
nigrolineatus at home loves
carrots.
Given what I found in terms
of their digestive physiology, it is pretty
clear why.
Do Panaque
eat carrots in nature?
I think the answer to that is
obvious (no), but they have been observed
to chew on roots that are submerged on river banks.
If
you want to know the best wood to give Panaque
in captivity, ask an aquarium
enthusiast who has been observing Panaque
in captivity for many decades.
Third, I went into this project on wood-eating catfishes hoping to find new and novel microbes that could produce ethanol from lignocellulose. In fact, when I first proposed working on wood-eating catfishes to my committee, I stated that I could see working on these fish for the next decade or more of my career if my original hypotheses panned out. However, before one can even start to think about microbes playing a role in digestion, steps need to be taken to examine the digestive strategy of the fish to show a reliance on endosymbionts. Please read the wonderful book by Karasov and Martinez del Rio “Physiological Ecology: How Animals Process Energy, Nutrients, and Toxins”. By adopting the theoretical considerations presented in that book (and all of the literature cited therein), I, with the support of my committee, reasoned that there were four main areas that had to be addressed before one could make the leap to microbial digestion in these fish:
1)
Intake.
How much
do these fish eat and how quickly do they pass it through their guts?
Herbivorous
animals reliant upon microbially-mediated digestion have long retention
of food
in the gut (e.g., 24 hours in termites).
2) Selective retention. Do these fish selectively retain small, or at least more digestible particles along their guts, thereby allowing microbial symbionts to digest refractory polysaccharides? Herbivorous and xylivorous animals reliant upon microbially-mediated digestion show selective retention of particles somewhere along their gut, usually in some sort of “chamber” separated from the rest of the gut by sphincters (e.g., the rumen of a cow or the hindgut chamber of the herbivorous fish Kyphosus sydneyanus), to engender microbial digestion (which is a slow process. Microbes need time).
3)
Digestive enzyme activity patterns. Is
there a pattern to digestive enzyme
activities along the guts of the fish?
Non-ruminant herbivores
(including fish) that are reliant upon microbial
digestion of refractory polysaccharides in their guts have elevated
activities
of refractory polysaccharide degrading enzymes in their hindguts (see
Skea et
al. 2005; 2007).
4) Redox potentials and short chain fatty acid (SCFA) concentrations. Is the gut of the fish anaerobic, and if so, are there high levels of fermentation occurring somewhere along the gut? Again, non-ruminant herbivores reliant upon endosymbionts have elevated concentrations of SCFAs in their hindguts, which are anaerobic.
From a mechanistic standpoint, these areas of digestion are consistent among wood-eating and herbivorous animals that are reliant upon microbial digestion in their GI tracts. Unless these four areas can each be shown to be conducive to microbial digestion, then the animal probably doesn’t rely upon microbial endosymbionts to meet their daily energetic needs. It is a consistent problem that people assume that ANY plant eating animal is reliant upon endosymbionts for digestion, when actually, relatively few are. Most herbivorous fish (and indeed, many herbivorous animals) studied thus far make a living on soluble sugars and polysaccharides in the cell contents of plant cells. Very few species of fish (e.g., Kyphosus sydneyanus, Odax pullus) have been shown to heavily utilize microbial (endosymbiont) digestion, and it occurs in the hindguts of those that do. Thus, feeding trials examining digestibility are only the “icing on the cake” in terms of showing whether an animal can digest refractory polysaccharides with the help of microbial endosymbionts.
Fifth,
the difference
between the words “eat” and
“digest” must be defined.
“Eat”
means to consume.
That is
it.
The word
“eat” does not imply that
whatever was consumed can be digested and utilized in a nutritional
manner by
an animal.
The word
“digest” implies
that what was eaten can be broken down (i.e., digested) by hydrolytic
enzymes
in the GI tract of an animal and absorbed for use in a nutritional
context.
To use these two words in a
real life example: Parrotfishes eat coral.
There is no denying that the
parrotfishes consume a considerable amount
of coral (and by this I mean the hard, calcium carbonate reef); gut
content
analyses show that the fish eat coral.
However, parrotfishes do not
only eat coral, and they certainly do not
digest coral in their guts.
There simply
isn’t any nutritional value to carbonates.
Many parrotfishes are
actually detritivores, taking bites of reef to access
the nutritional detritus that has collected in the interstitial spaces
of the
reef (Crossman et al. 2005).
Much in the
same way, the wood-eating catfishes “eat” a
considerable amount of wood (~70%
of their intake).
However, they poorly
“digest”
the bulk wood (the cellulose and lignin of the wood proper), but
efficiently
digest detritus and wood degradation products (e.g., disaccharides).
I hope this analogy helps.
Wood is the reef in the
Amazon, providing critical habitat to so
many fish species. Wood-eating catfishes, therefore, are the
parrotfish of the Amazon, not the beavers
of the fish world (as I commonly end my talks).
I just want to make it clear
that I never said that Panaque
do not “eat” wood.
They certainly do. The
wood-eating catfishes just poorly “digest” wood
itself.
Most
people seem to be caught up on the feeding trial that I
performed for the article: Inside the guts of wood-eating catfishes:
can they
digest wood? J Comp Phys B 179: 1011-1023
[pdf]
There are some
central themes to the criticisms that I would like to address.
The
main point is that water oak wood does not represent
wood the fish would encounter in the Amazon.
This is entirely true, and I
acknowledge that in the above referenced
article on page 11 and in the PFK article where I call for more
research on the
effects of tannins on these fish. That
being said, some comments went as far as to suggest that I should have
used
monocot “wood” for my feeding trials based on
an observation of Panaque
collected on a fallen palm tree
in Brazil.
This observation largely depends on where one collects Panaque. I went on an extensive collecting expedition with seven ichthyological experts (you can e-mail me and ask with who I collected fish) in the Río Marañon in northern Peru, where wood-eating catfishes are most diverse and abundant. We NEVER saw the fish feeding on palm or bamboo, another monocot tree. In fact, as I say in the above referenced article (Page 6, under the subheading “fiber digestibility and gut transit”), the fish appeared to feed non-discriminately on wood from any fallen tree.
All decaying trees had grazing scars on them, except for the monocots, which were not very abundant. Furthermore, the wood the fish were feeding on was heavily degraded to the point that one could break off pieces of wood with their bare hand. Even hardwoods can become soft over time if they are saturated in water and are heavily degraded. Thus, except for the tannins, which may be a significant problem (not sure yet), my choice of equally degraded water oak wood (which I could break, when wet, with my fingers) was not out of line. Degraded wood is loaded with microbes and microbial degradation products (e.g., disaccharides).
If the argument devolves to the
point that the wood-eating catfish require a certain type of wood, that
would demand
that the wood-eating catfishes be specialists on a specific wood type.
This simply isn't the case in nature and this constitutes
"hand
waving" to explain why a particular belief is not upheld by empirical
study. If the
fish are digesting wood via an endosymbiotic community, they should be
able to show growth on many different types of wood in captivity, which
has never been shown. Termites, for example, will show growth
and
reproductive output on many types of wood, although some wood types
(e.g.,
pine) are not as nutritious as others (Morales-Ramos and Rojas 2003).
Nevertheless, the termites were able to digest the pine with
the
aid of their endosymbionts and grow and reproduce (just at a lower
rate). Thus far there is one anecdotal
account (i.e., a personal observation) of growth on a wood-only diet by
Panaque
maccus in captivity.
Empirical evidence of this account has never been published,
nor
has it been replicated. I understand that the real problem
people
have with this previous observation (and my own digestibility study
showing the opposite) is that fishes obtained via the aquarium trade
were used. Hence, there may have been
"endosymbiont loss"
during shipment of the fish from South America. However, the
digestive enzyme, fermentation, and electron microscopy data from
wild-caught fish also do not support the presence of a large,
cellulose-digesting endosymbiotic community residing in the fishes'
guts. What I would find believable is that wood used in
captive
feeding trials thus far have not replicated the critical microbial
biomass found in wood Panaque
consume in nature, and also have lacked the presence of amorphous
detritus (i.e., detritus that is not of "wood origin" and is higher in
protein) to provide that extra needed protein boost. But this
argument only supports my findings.... the fish are reliant upon
microbial degradation in the environment, not in their guts.
There
is no such thing as "monocot wood". Monocot
plants, like palms, do not show
secondary growth like dicot plants, which produce true wood. Because
palm does not contain true wood it
may be easier for microbes to degrade palm in a riverine setting, and
the stringy
structure of palm would certainly act as a trap for non-wood detritus. So,
just because someone sees Panaque
on a palm doesn’t mean that the
fish prefer it, and, because palm doesn’t contain true-wood
that would mean that
the “wood-eating catfishes” wouldn’t be
eating “wood” when consuming
palm.
Panaque
are known to like "hearts of palm" in captivity, but palm hearts are
apical meristem tissue, which are comparatively low in fiber and richer
in soluble polysaccharides, proteins, and lipids.
One
comment compared the Panaque
to Pandas…. Perfect.
That is a perfect
comparison of an animal with a LONG intestine, rapid gut throughput,
and little
gastrointestinal fermentation (Dierenfeld et al. 1982; Stevens and Hume
1998).
Thus,
Pandas show poor cellulose digestibility (Dierenfeld et al. 1982).
That would be analogous to
what I saw with the loricariids. But,
Pandas don’t gnaw on wood like the Panaque
do; Pandas tend to eat the
leaves and shoots of living bamboo, which have more soluble
polysaccharides and sugars in
them than
degrading wood has.
Also, I am not sure
one can call bamboo “soft”. People
commonly use bamboo for weaponry and flooring, so it is hard, too.
A
comment noted that the P.
nigrolineatus
in my study lost less weight and excreted less nitrogen than Pt. disjunctivus,
a detritivorous
loricariid, on a wood diet.
As I say in
the above referenced article (Page 11), “Individuals
of Pt. disjunctivus likely
did worse from weight and fecal nitrogen loss
perspectives than individuals of P.
nigrolineatus because the
former lack
the spoon-shaped teeth necessary to gouge wood in significant
quantities (i.e.,
they had lower daily intake rates of wood). This is also supported by
the
observation that it took 6 weeks for Pt.
disjunctivus to produce amounts
of feces that P. nigrolineatus
produced in 4 weeks.” Of
course the Panaque
did better—they were eating more because they have the
correct teeth for gouging wood.
In a
subsequent study using stable isotopes (German
and Miles, 2010), I ground up the wood before feeding it to Pt.
disjunctivus. They
were
able to assimilate soluble components of wood detritus, but not the
intact cellulose.
When looking at the
loricariid phylogeny it is parsimonious that the spoon-shaped
teeth arose to allow the fish access to a resource (wood detritus) that
isn’t
accessible to loricariids with villiform teeth.
But, it is poor inference to
assume that this means that the wood-eating catfishes are
“eating” AND “digesting” wood.
There
is
fierce resource competition in any environment.
In fact, theory predicts that
when competition for surface resources
becomes strong enough, then digging for resources becomes a viable
strategy
(Richards 2002). Most
loricariids that
are sympatric with wood-eating loricariids are grazers, which scrape
and suck
the surface detritus from the river bed and from the surface of wood. Meanwhile,
detritus is collecting in the
interstitial spaces of wood, not to mention that the wood itself is
organic and
is being degraded, and thus represents an additional resource. With
so many loricariids in South America,
competition for the surface resources is probably fierce enough to
elicit
digging as a viable foraging strategy.
Hence, we see spoon-shaped
teeth emerge twice (independently) in
the loricariid
phylogeny. Nathan Lujan, Kirk Winemiller, and I
have a paper in press at Functional Ecology in which we show
isotopic and morphological evidence for niche partitioning among wood
grazing lorcariids. See the pubs page for this
article (when it becomes available).
Another comment implied that a long gut—which loricariids have—equates to long transit time of food in the gut and thus, a reliance on gastrointestinal fermentation by endosymbiotic microbes. This is absolutely incorrect. I have been studying fish digestion for 10 years now. One conclusion that I have come to (and I am not alone) is that a long gut actually equates to rapid gut transit. This is predicted theoretically (Sibly and Calow 1986; Horn and Messer 1992) and has been observed in other animals, like rats eating a low-quality food. High intake equates to rapid gut transit and a lengthening of the gut, not longer retention time. Hence, detritivores (e.g., mullets, gizzard shad, minnows, some chaetodontids, and loricariids), with high intake, have some of the longest guts measured, and transit times less than six hours (Horn 1989; Hood et al. 2005; German 2009). Furthermore, they have little GI fermentation occurring in their guts. Some of the fishes with the highest rates and levels of GI fermentation (e.g., Odax pullus; Mountfort et al. 2002) do not have long guts (~2X their body length), but do have relatively long retention of food in their guts (12-20 hours; Clements and Rees 1998). So please, stop perpetuating the rumor that a long gut implies long retention time, it simply isn’t true.
A
comment was made that fast egestion may allow the Panaque
to “seed” other fish (perhaps
younger fish) with microbes to aid in the digestion of wood. Although
corprophagy is common in ruminants
and in insects for the transference of intestinal microbiota to other
individuals of the same species (i.e., proctodeal trophollaxis), fast
egestion
does not imply that is occurring.
A
comment was made that other xylivorous animals (an example
would have been nice) have to eat and then move from place to place, so
they
hold their food in their guts longer in comparison to Panaque,
which sit on their food, thus allowing them to eat all day
and have fast egestion.
Termites (and
most xylivorous animals; look it up) live with their food, too, so that
is a
bad example. Fast egestion with no selective particle retention equates
to
little microbial (i.e., endosymbiont) digestion.
I never said the catfishes efficiently absorb “fermentation products”. Disaccharides—which the fish efficiently digest—are NOT fermentation products, like the SCFAs acetate, propionate and butyrate, the concentrations of which are low in the intestines of the wood-eating catfishes. Disaccharides are produced by extracellular digestive enzymes secreted by microbes onto wood that hydrolyze larger poly- and oligosaccharides under environmental conditions (aerobic or anaerobic). Fermentation implies the partial oxidation of a monosaccharide (e.g., glucose, mannose) under anaerobic conditions, which result in reduced byproducts like SCFAs. SCFAs are transported across the gut wall by different transporters (an anion exchanger; Titus and Ahearn 1988) than glucose (or other monomers) would be.
To
address it again.....there
was a concern that I used fish from the aquarium trade
for my study.
This is only true
for
the P. nigrolineatus
for the digestibility
study.
All other fish I studied were
wild-caught.
So, all of the gut size,
electron microscopy image, digestive enzyme data, etc., were from wild
fish
that I caught in Peru or Florida.
Because all of that data says
the same thing (these fish are not reliant
upon endosymbionts to digest wood), the digestibility data support my
other
findings.
Even if you remove the
digestibility data, the story doesn’t change and is just as
well supported by
the physiological and isotopic data from wild-caught fish.
Furthermore,
what would microbes cultured
from wild-caught fish tell you, especially in light of all of the
digestive
physiology data?
Unless one provides
physiological evidence that the fish utilize microbial pathways to meet
their
energetic needs, cultured microbes can be a) ingested with food and
transient;
b) residing in the gut but performing other functions (e.g., vitamin
synthesis, detoxification of plant secondary compounds).
A comment was made that wild-caught fish were found with guts full of wood. This is true, but gut content analyses performed with the naked eye are not quantitative. I quantitatively determined the proportions of different gut content items in the guts of wild-caught fish with the aid of microscopes. Wood is not the only thing these fish eat, as they also had detritus, algae, and diatoms in their guts. Wood is the most obvious item in their guts and makes up the largest proportion of their gut contents, but it is not the only thing they consume. See my article referenced above.
One
“respondent” went as far to call me “a
cocky grad
student who is not even a doctorate certified ichthyologist”
and therefore, my
data are not trustworthy.
I will
acknowledge that I can be arrogant (always trying to keep that in
check), but
who can say they are never arrogant? The
individual that made this comment has contempt for science and the
process of
earning a doctorate (I wonder if they have one?). Are
they saying that no graduate student
produces good, serious work?
Are you
kidding me?
Grad students are the
leading authors on groundbreaking work every single day.
I
am not saying that my work is
groundbreaking (far from it); it is almost as if this individual
assumes that I
did my dissertation work in a dark corner by myself (imagine Golem). I
worked under a strong committee that
featured one of the most well-known fish physiologists (Dr.
David H.
Evans), a
prominent nutritional ecologist (Dr.
Karen
A. Bjorndal), an avian
ecologist
with strong digestive physiology credentials (Dr.
Douglas J. Levey),
a
fish and
poultry digestive physiologist (Dr.
Richard D. Miles), and a
well-known
ichthyologist and PI of the All Catfish Species Inventory (Dr.
Larry
M.
Page).
Not to mention all of the
other
grad students and undergrads that helped along the way.
Moreover, all of the catfish articles
(German 2009; German and Bittong 2009; German et al. 2010; German and
Miles 2010; Lujan et al. 2011) were peer-reviewed.
That
means that they were read and critiqued
by other nutritional physiologists. So,
if you think I was just a grad student that did crap work for his
dissertation, well that
implies
that I did crap work and slipped it by each of my committee members and
the
reviewers of the manuscripts.
Please
e-mail any one of my committee members and see what they think of my
project.
Plus, I did earn an actual
doctorate in
zoology from the
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