Fish eye lenses are onion-like spheres, rich in protein. This makes it difficult to track diet over a fish’s lifetime, with the exception of the eye lens. As a fish grows, many tissues eventually are replaced with new cells that isotopically resemble the habitat where the fish is currently feeding. Stable isotopes such as carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur are natural markers found in the environment and can be integrated into tissues of fishes through diet ( see Halloween blog). In this study, we used stable isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur in fish eyes to better understand diet and habitat history of juvenile and adult Chinook Salmon ( Oncorhynchus tshawytscha). This approach formed the basis for our publication Advancing diet reconstruction in fish eye lenses in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. You just need to know where to look and how to understand what the eye is telling you. If we know what a fish has been eating and when, then we can figure out where a fish has been. It is strange to think of an eye as a diet journal, but a fish’s eye can tell much about what it has been eating at each point in its life.
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