A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF PROTEIN AND AMINO ACID NUTRITION CAN POTENTIALLY IMPROVE QUALITY AS WELL AS COST SAVINGS OF VANNAMEI FEED

In the shrimp aquaculture in Southeast Asia (SEA), commercial Vannamei feeds may contain crude protein levels from 32% to higher than 40%. From farmers' perspective, one of the major issues has been raised is whether to feed shrimps with high or low protein as some farmers may choose to feed high protein diets to shrimps with an expectation of faster growth, albeit costly and probably uneconomical. On the other hand, feeding less expensive protein sources can be a false economy as these feeds may have unbalanced nutrients, low palatability and less digestible, often leading to environmental as well as economic problems.. In fish and shrimp farming, similar to other farmed animals, nutrition is critical because feed contributes higher than 40% of the production costs and that better knowledge of diet formulations continues to support the shrimp farming industry as it is driven to satisfy growing demand for affordable, safe, and high-quality product therefore this abstract will be focused on feed efficiency directly related to growth optimization and feed cost savings.

With an approximate FCR 1.5 the feeds required in 2014 were nearly 5.8 million tonnes (or 3 million tonnes in case the production from China is excluded) to grow these shrimps to a market size. In addition, some 2 million tonnes of proteins were consumed by the farmed shrimps according to FAO (2016). A shrimp diet which contains soybean meal, wheat flour, fishmeal, poultry by product and rice brand as protein sources is formulated to have the ratios of Met, Met+Cys, Thr, Arg, Ile, Leu, Val, His and Phe on Lys (ideal amino acid ratios) corresponding to the levels taken from a complete feed survey (Table 1). This diet is then fine-tuned by adjusting the ideal amino acid ratios by using the data recommended by AMINOShrimp^® (Table 2), which is an interactive software calculating amino acid recommendations for Vannamei, resulting in a cost reduction, better protein deposition as well as less catabolism of excess amino acids.