Form and performance: body shape and prey-capture success in four drift-feeding minnows

Identifying links between morphology and performance for ecologically relevant tasks will help elucidate the relationships between organismal design and fitness. We conducted a laboratory study to quantify the relationship between variation in body shape and prey-capture success in four drift-feeding minnow species. We offered drifting prey to individual fish in a test flume, counted successful strikes to measure prey-capture success and recorded the position (X, Y coordinates) of ten landmarks on each fish's outline to delineate the specimen's form. We then quantified shape variation among species and related it to capture performance through thin-plate spline analysis. Body shape varied significantly among species and with specimen size and was the major determinant of capture success, explaining 45-47% of its variability. Prey-capture success at differing velocities differed among species, but once the effects of shape and size were accounted for, those differences were no longer significant. Allometric shape changes appeared responsible for most of the ontogenetic variation in capture performance, although other size-related, non-shape factors also seemed relevant. Fishes with deeper, shorter bodies, more caudally placed median fins and larger, more upward-pointing mouths exhibited greater capture success than more fusiform fish, suggesting that streamlining, which is energetically advantageous for sustained swimming, entails a cost in terms of prey-capture ability. Our findings demonstrate a strong connection between organismal shape and performance and provide empirical evidence of the cost of morphological specialization for fishes in the drift-feeding functional guild.