Fish tissue lipid‐C:N relationships for correcting δ ¹³ C values and estimating lipid content in aquatic food‐web studies

Abstract

Among-species consistency in the relationship between fish muscle tissue C:N ratio and lipid content supports the application of arithmetic mass balance to normalize δ(13) C values for lipid content. The uncertainty associated with both lipid extraction quality and choice of model parameters constrains the achievable precision of normalized δ(13) C values to about ±1.0‰.