Aquaculture America 2024

February 18 - 21, 2024

San Antonio, Texas

EFFECTS OF REPLACING SOYBEAN MEAL WITH CORN FERMENTED PROTEIN ON GROWTH PERFORMANCE, FEED UTILIZATION AND BODY CONDITION INDICES OF JUVENILE TILAPIA Oreochromis niloticus

Jun Wang*, Edgar Júnio Damasceno Rodrigues, Pedro L. Pucci Figueiredo d e Carvalho, Blaine Suehs , Delbert M. Gatlin III

 

Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology

Texas A&M University System

 College Station, TX, 77843-2258

junnywang@163.com

 



 Fish farming is growing faster than other animal protein producing sectors and will play a significant role in global food security. Therefore, it is utmost important to increase both fish production sustainability and economic viability. The use of renewable alternative ingredients, such as plant-based feedstuffs , can improve fish farming sustainability and potentially reduce production costs. Corn fermented protein (CFP) is a  co-product of  the ethanol industry and  is considered a  promising feedstuff to partially replace  soybean meal (SB M)  and other  protein  feedstuffs  in aquafeeds. In the present study, a feeding trial w as  conducted to evaluate the growth performance of juvenile  tilapia  Oreochromis niloticus  fed diets in which CFP was substituted primarily for SBM. A r eference diet was formulated to contain ~45 % crude protein contributed by dehulled, solvent-extracted SBM (25% by weight) , poultry byproduct meal (14% by weight), hydrolyzed feather meal (6% by weight) , and menhaden fishmeal (5% by weight) . Five  isonitrogenous  experimental diets were prepared by primarily replacing SBM  in the Reference diet  with  CFP  at 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30%, respectively. Lysine (Lys)  was supplemented in all diets to the established requirement level .  Diets were fed to quadruplicate groups of juvenile fish with average initial weight (+SEM) of 2.32±0.01 g/fish for 8 weeks. All dietary groups had 100% survival.  No significant  effects due to the different diets were observed in f ish responses including percent weight gain (WG), feed efficiency (FE),  feed intake (FI),  protein efficiency ratio (PER),  condition factor (CF),  and hepatosomatic index (HSI) (Table 1) .  In fact, WG of fish fed the CFP3 0% diet was 15% higher than  that of fish fed  the Reference diet, suggesting that CFP  improved juvenile tilapia growth performance and  could  completely  replace SB M in  the Reference diet .