WEANING OF SENEGALESE SOLE: REALIZING MAXIMUM GROWTH POTENTIAL THROUGH FEEDING REGIMES

Sofia Engrola ^a, Wilson Pinto ^b, Luís E.C. Conceição ^b

^aCCMAR, Universidade do Algarve, Campus de Gambelas, 8005-139 Faro, Portugal
^bSparos Lda, Área Empresarial de Marim, Lote C, 8700-221 Olhão, Portugal

E-mail: sengrola@ualg.pt

Senegalese sole is a species that raises much interest in commercial farming in Europe. Still, sub-optimal nutrition may have profound effects on weaning success and later juvenile quality. Optimized feeds need to be provided in sufficient quantities and in a manner adequate to feeding behaviour, to fully express such growth potential, while avoiding water quality/disease problems caused by excessive feeding. Despite the abundant information on larval development, until recently there was a lack of reliable methods to characterize fundamental digestive and physiologic changes. Novel physiological and molecular tools brought up new information on the functional ontogeny of digestion and growth, like tracer studies (Conceição et al., 2010; Richard et al., 2015). These new tools allowed significant advances in sole larvae feed formulation and diet technology with more reproducible weaning success and impressively faster growth rates. Survival rates during benthonic weaning used to oscillate between 50 and 90% by 2010 (Engrola et al., 2009), while currently survival of batches at weaning below 90% is already considered poor results. Overall, nutrition and feeding of Senegalese sole larvae had major improvements in recent years. Still, further development in microdiets technologies and formulations will likely allow earlier weaning and get us closer to the maximum growth potential of sole.

Acknowledgements

This work was undertaken in the framework of project SOLEAWIN (310305/FEP/71) partially supported by PROMAR Program (Portugal) with FEDER funds. Sofia Engrola acknowledges a FCT investigator grant IF/00482/2014/CP1217/CT0005 funded by the European Social Fund, the Operational Programme Human Potential and the Foundation for Science and Technology of Portugal (FCT).

References

Conceição, L.E.C., Aragão, C., Richard, N., Engrola, S., Gavaia, P., Mira, S., Dias, J., 2010. Novel methodologies in marine fish larval nutrition. Fish Physiol. Biochem. 36, 1-16.

Engrola, S., Figueira, L., Conceição, L.E.C., Gavaia, P.J., Ribeiro, L., Dinis, M.T., 2009. Co-feeding in Senegalese sole larvae with inert diet from mouth opening promotes growth at weaning. Aquaculture 288, 264-272.

Richard, N., Engrola, S., Palma, P., Simes, D., Conceição, L.E.C., 2015. Assessment of protein digestive capacity and metabolic utilisation during ontogeny of Senegalese sole: A tracer study using in vivo produced radiolabelled polypeptide fractions. Aquaculture 441, 35-44.