For more than 200 years, the metabolic response that accompanies meal digestion has
been characterized, theorized, and experimentally studied. Historically labeled “specific …

The environment is changing rapidly, and considerable research is aimed at understanding
the capacity of organisms to respond. Changes in environmental temperature are …

Many snakes can subdue and swallow very large prey after many months of fasting. The
functional capacity and the mass of the gastrointestinal organs regress during fasting, but …

Digestion and assimilation of nutrients and energy is central to survival. At its most basic
level, investigations of digestion in animals must examine digestive efficiency, or how much …

Improving the feed conversion ratio (FCR; the amount of feed consumed relative to the
amount of weight gain) can reduce both production costs and environmental impacts of …

Predatory fish in the wild consume whole prey including hard skeletal parts like shell and
bone. Shell and bone are made up of the buffering minerals calcium carbonate (CaCO3) …

Immune activity is temperature-dependent and strongly related to thermal biology in
ectotherms. Eurythermic, vs stenothermic, species commonly show a broader range of …

Processing food (eg ingestion, digestion, assimilation) requires energy referred to as
specific dynamic action (SDA) and is at least partially fuelled by oxidation of the nutrients (eg …

The optimisation of feed composition is fundamental to maximising fish growth efficiency and
performance in sustainable aquaculture. Traditionally this has been achieved through …

Ocean acidification (OA) and Ocean Warming (OW) are ongoing environmental changes
that present a suite of physiological challenges to marine organisms. Larval stages may be …