Are hydrolysates the key to success with low fish meal diets for salmon?

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

Fish meal is still considered an essential raw material for carnivorous fish like salmon. The increasing demand over the last few decades and the static supply has led to a steadily increase of the market price of this ingredient that has put a lot of pressure in the aquaculture industry to find alternative ingredients. For those reasons it is extremely important for us to find the key to a further reduction of fish meal or even the total depletion in the near future. One of the main problems when reducing fish meal is the reduction of feed intake that ends up affecting the performance of the fish, this could be related with the soluble protein fraction of the fish meal, rich in free aminoacids, small peptides and nucleotides, as this fraction is lacking in most protein plants. To cover that gap, hydrolysates seems to be the best current solution in the market, as they are extremely rich in soluble proteins so small inclusions will cover the lack of a good proportion of fish meal. The purpose of this project is to test whether the use of hydrolysates can cover the gap in salmon performance when we reduce the levels of fish meal further down from our current commercial levels or even when fish meal is not present at all in the feeds.