Can krill meal replace Fish meal and improve the flesh quality?

Offentlig prosjektsammendrag

As recently reviewed in a publication at the Aquaculture nutrition scientific journal (Kaur et al.2022), Krill meal has been tested at different stages of salmon life cycle since the late eighties. In most of the studies performed, partial replacement of Fish meal by Krill meal has been described as positive for performance and quality of the fillet. Most of those studies were, however, using control feeds that are, nowadays quite different in composition to modern commercial diets, in where the use of marine ingredients has been extremely reduced. The low inclusion levels of fish meal that are still currently present in salmon feeds are covering some nutritional aspects that go beyond protein requirements such us palatability and other sensory attributes that it has been difficult to replace when using only plant meals. Production of krill meal has evolved the last couple of decades as technology on the catching vessels has improved quite significantly to secure a high quality product that keeps high sustainability standards. Main attributes of Krill meal beyond a fair level of protein (~60%), are high levels of marine phospholipids, choline, astaxanthin and low molecular weight compounds that act as attractants. All of those functional nutrients have been reported to be beneficial in Atlantic salmon to improve palatability, lipid transport fillet quality and control inflammatory responses. Those attributes and the sustainability aspect of the production of this product make it really interesting candidate to fully replace the fish meal left in Atlantic salmon feeds. In this project we will test a partial and full replacement of fish meal by krill meal that has been produced adding back the stick water during its production and the effect of this replacement in performance, fish health and fillet quality.