A significant amount of fruits and vegetables are wasted each year, causing negative impacts on both the economy and the environment. Utilizing them as animal feed would help reduce feeding costs and, simultaneously, would align with efforts to prevent resource wastage and improve the economic efficiency of processing plants. The present research aimed to optimize a solid-state fermentation (SSF) process to produce nutritionally and functionally enriched potential aquaculture feed. SSF led to an increase of protein and fats, improving essential amino acid profile and fatty acid concentration in the fermented ingredients. Extraction led to a bioactive extract product with in vitro antioxidant and antimicrobial activity against bacteria from Vibrio, Tenacibaculum, Bacillus and Staphylococcus genera (figure 1) . In vivo trials using fermented products and extracts resulted in no differences in the productivity parameters compared to a control diet in sea bass, however, the inclusion of 0.5% of fermented extract in the diets led to a reduction in mortality when sea bass was exposed to the pathogen Tenacibaculum maritimum (table 1).
SSF succeeded in obtaining a stabilized material enriched in protein, fat and digestible proteins that can be used in 5% inclusion of aquaculture diets without affecting productive performance. In addition, fermented products could be extracted to obtain a functional ingredient with positive effect in the immune system of sea bass.