Page 4 - World Aquaculture Magazine - March 2011

2 March 2011
Contents (continued)
Editor’s note
The National Research Council (NRC) of the
National Academy of Sciences in the United States
has periodically produced updated versions of a
publication known since the 1993 edition as The
Nutrient Requirements of Fish and Shrimp. I chaired
the committee that produced The Nutrient Require-
ments of Fish, which was a relatively small publica-
tion. That was updated in 1993 (when shrimp were
added), and the number of pages in the publication
increased a bit, but not substantially.
Since the 1993 version of the document was published,
the amount of information on aquatic animal nutrition has
grown exponentially. Because of that, the NRC established
a committee of experts late in the last decade to update the
publication. In mid-2010, I was asked to serve as review coor-
dinator for the publication, which involved receiving reviews
from several world-class aquatic animal nutritionists and
summarizing their editorial comments and recommendations
so the committee who wrote the document could respond.
Not knowing what I was getting into, I readily agreed.
Soon, a very large notebook binder was plopped on my
desk, having been lugged into my office by my assistant.
What had been a document that, when published, probably
amounted to something like 150 pages or less in previous
editions, had become a behemoth of some 1,000 or more
pages in draft – undoubtedly the page numbers in the final
document will be less, but will still by significant longer than
prior editions.
Soon, the reviews started rolling in. Most of the
dozen or so reviewers were assigned specific groups
of chapters to comment upon, but at least a few re-
viewed the entire manuscript. Each of the reviewers
had obviously spent a good deal of time and put
in the necessary effort to provide some very good
feedback to the committee that developed the draft
document.
I went through the tome, noting in the margins the
comments of each reviewer (who I assigned letters
(A, B, C…) to keep them anonymous, made a notation on
each of their comments and put a sticky note on pages where
comments were made. At the end of that exercise, I had hun-
dreds of yellow sticky note flags festooning the document. It
was obvious that the reviewers didn’t hold back on providing
feedback.
As I was going through the document, writing in the mar-
gins and placing the sticky notes on the pages, I also sum-
marized the comments in a document that was ultimately
submitted to the NRC for dissemination to the committee.
It was obvious that revision would require a great deal of
work, but that on balance, the committee had done an excel-
lent job.
A number of subjects that had not been covered in ear-
lier versions of the publication were covered. Some of those
topics required their own chapters, while others were incor-
porated into chapters with titles that had been included in
(Continued on page 6)
61 Microbial levan, an ideal prebiotic and
immunonutrient in aquaculture
S. K. Gupta, Pronob Das, S. K. Singh, M. S.
Akhtar, D. K. Meena and S. C. Mandal
64 Contamination problems using Sargassum
sp. extract with the sea cucumber,
Holothuria leucospilota, in captive breeding
Abdul-Reza D abbagh , Mohammad-Reza
Sedaghat and Musa Keshavarz
Departments
4 Indian aquaculture boosted for future
6 AQUABIO - The Brazilian Society of
Aquaculture and Aquatic Biology
10 China Society of Fisheries 2010 annual
meeting
19 WORLD AQUACULTURE 2011
59 Aquaculture Association of Canada
71 Advertisers’ Index
72 Calendar
72 Membership Application