Skretting Aquaculture Research Centre (ARC) is taking extra measures to ensure a growing list of functional feed ingredients is delivering potential for productivity, health promotion and sustainability in aquaculture. The company is giving increasing attention to feed ingredients that perform special functions. Wolfgang Koppe, leader of the ARC Fish Nutrition team, opined that as they developed a deeper understanding of fish nutrition over the past 20 years we realised there are some minor ingredients that have an important effect in addition to, or even without contributing to, conventional nutrition for growth.
It is told that these functional ingredients contribute to feed conversion and growth rate, fish health and welfare and, importantly for the future of aquaculture, to reducing dependence on high levels of fishmeal in the feeds. The arrival of beta-glucans in the early 1990s and their ability to boost immune systems provided an important tool in efforts to combat the effects of bacterial diseases such as furunculosis that had become an increasing problem.
Dr Koppe added that in the 1990s our attention was focused on analysing the nutrient content of fish meal as a package of nutrients: fatty acids, amino acids, minerals and vitamins. Triglycerides are absorbed and used mainly for energy generation and fat deposition. Phospholipids are known to influence digestive processes. Other functional ingredients we have identified support, for example, gut health and hepatic function. Others act as immuno stimulants and as antioxidants performing important functions within the fish body down to cellular level.
