Empirical relationships between body tissue composition and bioelectrical impedance of brook trout Salvelinus fontinalis from a Rocky Mountain Stream

Abstract

Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) analysis was carried out in the field on anaesthetized Salvelinus fontinalis electrofished from a mountain stream in Alberta, Canada; the fish were then sacrificed for subsequent analysis of tissue composition. Water content was assessed by comparing wet and dry mass, and total body lipid content was measured by Soxhlet extraction with petroleum ether. A multivariate analysis of body composition and size metric against impedance measurements was carried out, and the main findings were (1) body size and related metrics were strongly related to volumetric impedance measures, as shown in several previous studies, (2) lipid content (%) and water content (%) were both well predicted by regression models whose main predictor was reactance and (3) reactance and resistance measures that were series-based produced excellent predictions of tissue composition, whereas the corresponding parallel-based models were crude. The BIA measurements are quick and easy to conduct and appear to provide excellent predictions of a number of proximate body components, without the need to kill the fish; however, more studies are required to provide improved understanding of possible effects of region, season, life stage and species on measurements.