Veggie Diets For Salmon

Things are progressing in finding solutions to developing more environmentally friendly feeds for use in Aquaculture. Feeds with more vegetable based ingredients, leading to further reductions in fish meal and fish oil requirements.

Just found this interesting story by Megan Ogilvie, Special to The Star.

(April 14, 2006) - A browse through the seafood section of your local grocery store may soon reveal a new dinner choice: vegetarian salmon.

A team of Canadian scientists have found that farm-raised salmon can be fed a diet high in vegetable oil without suffering any ill effects. This is good news for fish farmers since it will cost less to feed their stocks. But the consumer may reap the biggest benefit because the fish will have lower levels of contaminants.

The results, presented last week at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Meeting in Canterbury, England, were met with excitement by people in the aquaculture industry, says Colin Brauner, one of the lead authors of the study and a professor of zoology at the University of British Columbia.

"There is some concern that farmed fish have high levels of some contaminants," says Brauner.

Farm-raised salmon are currently fed pellets made primarily of fishmeal and oil derived from processing wild marine fish such as anchovies, which can be tainted with contaminants, including PCBs and dioxins.

Scientists are eager to find out whether farm-raised fish will thrive on alternative diets that are lower in fishmeal and fish oil and higher in vegetable oils, says Brauner.

The Canadian research may help answer that question. The study found that up to 75 per cent of the dietary fat in a farm-raised salmon's diet can come from canola oil — the other 25 per cent comes from fishmeal or fish oil — without the fish suffering any negative health effects. The seven-month feeding trial on more than 7,000 spring Chinook salmon investigated four different diets, with the canola oil diet providing optimal results.

See the entire article at: This Link

This is the type of research that we need more of. Good research in nutrition and feed formulation can go a long way into finding methods to reduce costs and increase safety.