Abstract1. Isotope analysis has high potential for understanding fish ecology and food-web structure in aquatic ecosystems. The utility of isotope analysis will be greatly improved if we can reconstruct the chronology of several isotopes at multiple growth stages of individual fish. However, no practical methods exist for reconstructing the chronology of light-element isotopes (e.g. δ 13 C, δ 15 N, δ 34 S, andHere, we present and test a new analytical approach for reconstructing the isotopic ratios of light isotopes at multiple life-stages in teleost fishes.2. We sampled an anadromous salmon species, masu salmon Oncorhynchus masou (n = 3), along with water from its natal stream and from the ocean. We subdivided the vertebral centra of the salmon equally into 10 sections and extracted bone collagen from each sample. We then measured the stable sulphur isotope ratios of each vertebral section and compared them with δ 4. Our results show that the vertebral centra of teleost fishes record isotopic information from juvenile to adult life stages. We suggest that our method can provide reproducible isotopic chronology, even in teleost fishes smaller than 50 cm. This method can be used in isoscape studies and in studies of the ecology of marine teleost fishes. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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