Effective utilization of dietary plant protein (PP) by fish is limited in some species. Nutritional Programming (NP) is a technique used to improve the acceptance of PP by fish wherein the fish is introduced to PP early in life, causing a nutritional adaptation to the same PP in later life stages . While NP is typically done with formulated feed, t he objective of this study was to examine how NP via live food enriched with soybean meal (SBM) affects growth performance and intestinal health of Yellow perch Perca flavescens during its later stages .
Yellow perch larvae at 6 dph were distributed into 12 (280 L) tanks at 48 larvae per L. Four treatment groups were used: (1) a positive control group that received unenriched live food followed by fishmeal (FM)-based diet throughout the experiment; (2) a negative control group which received unenriched live food followed by SBM-based diet throughout the experiment; (3) a nutritionally programmed (PRO) group that received live food enriched with SBM , followed by FM diet in the juvenile stage and then a SBM -based diet during a SBM challenge; and (4) a non-programmed (Non-PRO) group that received unenriched live food followed by FM diet in the juvenile stage and then a SBM -based diet during a SBM challenge.
At the end of the SBM challenge at 145 dph the PRO group and positive control achieved a similar average weight (g), both of which were significantly higher (P < 0.05) compared to Non-PRO (Figure 1). PRO also achieved a similar weight gain (% ) to positive contr ol (Figure 1), and a weight gain (g) numerically higher than Non-PRO. This study showed that enriched live food is an effective vehicle for NP in Yellow perch given that growth performance of the programmed fish fed SBM was similar to the positive control and improved over the non-programmed fish. Intestinal health results will be presented during the oral presentation.