Dear Riccardo,

I would like to recommend you the book "Production Hydrobiology" but fortunately it only in Russian. But I think you could write to Dr. Sergey Golubkov and Dr. Victor Bogatov who are the authors of this book and working for along time on trophic relationship in freshwater.

Best wishes,

Tatiana

http://www.twirpx.com/file/1451972/

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sergei_Golubkov

http://map.biorf.ru/pages.php?id=Bogatov_V_V

Dear Riccardo,

This is a potentially very large question.  The "nutritional value" of members of a stream food web (or any food web) can be measured by several different variables.  These include carbon content, elemental stoichiometry, total lipids, specific fatty acids, protein content, calories, and so on. And these variable do not necessarily correlate among stream components or ecological conditions.

For this reason there can be no single measure, and no single article or review paper that covers all these bases.

What are your goals?  Is it energy content you are interested in? Or elemental concentrations?  Or perhaps some measure of nutritional "quality"?  These questions pertain to the goals of your study and can help decide which measures are most applicable for your question.

If you could describe your aims, you can then decide on the best measures to apply.

Best regards,

John Wehr

Dear Riccardo,

This is a potentially very large question.  The "nutritional value" of members of a stream food web (or any food web) can be measured by several different variables.  These include carbon content, elemental stoichiometry, total lipids, specific fatty acids, protein content, calories, and so on. And these variable do not necessarily correlate among stream components or ecological conditions.

For this reason there can be no single measure, and no single article or review paper that covers all these bases.

What are your goals?  Is it energy content you are interested in? Or elemental concentrations?  Or perhaps some measure of nutritional "quality"?  These questions pertain to the goals of your study and can help decide which measures are most applicable for your question.

If you could describe your aims, you can then decide on the best measures to apply.

Best regards,

John Wehr

Dear Riccardo,

This is a potentially very large question.  The "nutritional value" of members of a stream food web (or any food web) can be measured by several different variables.  These include carbon content, elemental stoichiometry, total lipids, specific fatty acids, protein content, calories, and so on. And these variable do not necessarily correlate among stream components or ecological conditions.

For this reason there can be no single measure, and no single article or review paper that covers all these bases.

What are your goals?  Is it energy content you are interested in? Or elemental concentrations?  Or perhaps some measure of nutritional "quality"?  These questions pertain to the goals of your study and can help decide which measures are most applicable for your question.

If you could describe your aims, you can then decide on the best measures to apply.

Best regards,

John Wehr

Dear John and Tatiana, 

Thanks for your answer. In my Master's thesis I'm studying the feeding habits of Salmo cettii (Rafinesque, 1810), an indigenous Italian trout. One of the goal I'd like to  achieve is  to evaluate how the diet of this fish changes in order to the nutritional quality of a prey. Unfortunately, I've only found some paper about Echinogammarus nutritional value, a very consumed prey by this trout.

Best Wishes,

R.L.

Dear Riccardo,

We do a lot of work in our lab with fatty acids (mainly algae to inverts) and there is a large literature with fish in food webs. 

Here are a few citations to check out:

- Kainz, Martin, Michael T. Arts, and Asit Mazumder. "Essential fatty acids in the planktonic food web and their ecological role for higher trophic levels." Limnology and Oceanography 49.5 (2004): 1784-1793.

- Brett, MICHAEL T., and Dörthe C. Müller-Navarra. "The role of highly unsaturated fatty acids in aquatic foodweb processes." Freshwater Biology 38.3 (1997): 483-499.

- Parrish, Christopher C. "Essential fatty acids in aquatic food webs." Lipids in aquatic ecosystems. Springer New York, 2009. 309-326.

- Goedkoop, Willem, et al. "Fatty acid biomarkers show dietary differences between dominant chironomid taxa in Lake Erken." Freshwater Biology 40.1 (1998): 135-143.

- Sushchik, N. N., et al. "Comparison of fatty acid composition in major lipid classes of the dominant benthic invertebrates of the Yenisei river." Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part B: Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 134.1 (2003): 111-122.

- Iverson, Sara J., Kathryn J. Frost, and L. C. Lang. "Fat content and fatty acid composition of forage fish and invertebrates in Prince William Sound, Alaska: factors contributing to among and within species variability." Marine Ecology Progress Series 241 (2002): 161-181.

I've also attached one of our papers - not fish but basal food sources and invertebrates.

Good luck,

John

Thanks a lot, John!

Greetings from Italy!

R.L.