FishResp

FishResp performs quality control and correction of aquatic respirometry data to account for microbial background respiration and estimate absolute and mass-specific aerobic metabolic rates from oxygen uptake measurements.

Key Features:

• Versatile data input: Accepts data from a variety of respirometry systems to accommodate diverse experimental setups.
• Quality control routines: Implements QC procedures to identify problematic measurement segments prior to analysis.
• Technical issue detection: Detects technical issues such as chamber leaks and inadequate water circulation that affect oxygen uptake measurements.
• Background respiration correction: Provides six options for correcting raw data to account for microbial oxygen consumption.
• Data filtering: Enables filtering of measurements based on user-defined criteria to refine datasets for analysis.
• Metabolic rate estimation: Calculates both absolute and mass-specific metabolic rates from corrected oxygen uptake data.

Scientific Applications:

• Aerobic metabolic rate estimation: Derives aerobic metabolic rates from oxygen uptake measurements in aquatic animals.
• Comparative physiology and ecology: Improves comparability of metabolic rate estimates for studies in evolutionary biology and conservation physiology.
• Species-specific case studies: Has been demonstrated using data from Gasterosteus aculeatus and Poecilia reticulata.

Methodology:

Computational steps include quality-control routines to detect chamber leaks and inadequate water circulation, data filtering based on user-defined criteria, six alternative corrections for background (microbial) respiration, and calculation of absolute and mass-specific metabolic rates from corrected oxygen uptake data.