The aim of the study was to evaluate the functional ontogeny of the digestive system of Pseudoplatystoma punctifer through the analysis of the activity of the main intestinal (alkaline phosphatase, aminopeptidase N, maltase and leucine-alanine peptidase), pancreatic (trypsin, chymotrypsin, total alkaline proteases, bile-salt activated lipase and amylase) and gastric (pepsin) enzymes. Larvae were raised in triplicate in a recirculation system from 4 to 27 days post fertilization (dpf) at an initial density of 90 larvae L −1 , 27.8 ± 0.7 °C and 0 L: 24D photoperiod. Larvae were fed from 4 to 17 dpf with Artemia nauplii and weaned onto an experimentally formulated feed (crude protein content ~ 45%; crude fat content ~ 10%; crude carbohydrate ~ 8%) within 3 days, then continued with the same diet until the end of the trial. P. punctifer showed an exponential growth pattern with two diffe...

The two years of larvae collection in the Marañón and Ucayali rivers were financed by the Concejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONCYTEC) of Peru, who through the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico, Tecnológico y de Innovación Tecnológica (FONDECYT), project 088-2014-FONDECYT-DE. The LMI EDIA and UMR DIADE financed the metabarcoding analyses. The authors acknowledge the IRD itrop HPC (South Green Platform) at IRD Montpellier for providing HPC resources that contributed to the research results reported within this paper ( https://bioinfo.ird.fr/ - http://www.southgreen.fr ). We are also grateful to Domingo García for his assistance during field work. We are also grateful to Juan José Palacios Vega (IIAP) for the elaboration of Figure 1 .