Comparison and unification of carbon stable isotope ratios in specific aquatic biota

Stable isotope analysis has become a convenient tool for aquatic food web research in recent years. However, one controversial point on using stable isotope analysis for food web is whether to extract lipids or not before stable isotope analysis due to strong discrimination against ¹³C and more negative ¹³C in lipid-rich tissues independent of diet that can be induced by the key step of endogenous lipid synthesis. Lipid extraction may result in the loss of non-lipid compounds that alters δ¹⁵N, which urged the development of arithmetic correction techniques for δ¹³C, although the techniques as well as their underlying assumptions were seldom systematically verified. A novel lipid normalizing model for different aquatic biota was therefore established and applied to the East China Sea (ECS). According to the experimentally measured δ¹³C values of dorsal muscle of 11 common fish species, organs and whole-body of Japanese Anchovy (Engraulis japonicas), the proposed model is verified to be appropriate to the food web research on the East China Sea.