Fish metabolism


Fish metabolism is shown as SMR (inactive or 'resting' fish), 'routine' MR (spontaneous activity in addition to rest), and active MR (forced exercise). Many fish do not ‘rest’ in the classical sense; they continually swim, in some cases as a matter of necessity for ventilating their gills. The ‘routine’ and ‘active MR’ categories include a wide range of exercise intensities and are intended to provide rough estimates only.  There is no apparent difference in active MR of different classes of fish, but SMR is about 2-fold higher in Teleosts than in Agnathans, with Elasmobranchs intermediate.


Data from which the equations were derived came from the FishBase data set. Note that in many cases the size range is small (especially for Agnathans); and in other cases there is a sampling bias towards small individuals (particularly for Elasmobranchs). This leads to some doubt about the validity of MR predictions, particularly for large specimens.


FishBase (2000) Froese, R. and D. Pauly, Editors

World Wide Web electronic publication, www.fishbase.org/p>