IDENTIFYING THE MINIMAL LEVEL OF FISHMEAL INCLUSION IN HIGH SOY FEED FORMULATIONS FOR FLORIDA POMPANO Trachinotus carolinus  

Melanie Rhodes*, Romi Novriadi, Carter Ullman, Sirirat Chatvijitkul, Guillaume Salze, Terry Hanson and D. Allen Davis
School of Fisheries, Aquaculture and Aquatic Sciences
Auburn University Auburn, AL 36849. E-mail: mar0009@auburn.edu

High soy-based feed formulations for Florida pompano have provided good performance, however, when animal proteins are completely removed from the diets there is a depression in growth. A series of 4 diets was formulated to re-evaluate the minimal inclusion of fishmeal (FM) in high soy diets where FM was replaced with NutriVance, a novel soy protein concentrate, 15% FM was reduced to 6% FM in Trial 1 then, a second series of 4 diets was formulated to confirm results and evaluate lower inclusion of FM to 0% FM (Table 1). The growth trials were conducted in a recirculating systems with three replicates per treatment, twenty fish were stocked in each tank. The fish were fed to apparent satiation and feed intake was recorded. The trials were conducted for 8 weeks, final results for Trial 1 and current results at week 4 for Trial 2 (Table 2). At the termination of each trial fish were frozen for proximate and amino acid composition as well as histological samples.