Efficacy of a fungal fermented product as fishmeal replacement in the diet of Penaeus monodon Fabricius post-larvae

Abstract

The efficacy of diets, formulated by inclusion of an Aspergillus niger fermented product (AFP) as fish meal substitute, for Penaeus monodon post-larvae was determined. AFP was derived by solid state fermentation (SSF) of a mixture of soybean flour, wheat flour, groundnut oil cake and sesame oil cake in the ratio of 4: 3: 2: 1 respectively for 96 h. The feeding trial was conducted in post-larvae stocked @10 animals in circular perspex tanks containing 40 l of water with five dietary treatments each with three replicates for 52 days. The diets containing graded levels of AFP substituting 0, 50, 150, 250 and 350 g kg-1 of fishmeal were fed to the post-larvae. Data on the growth performance and nutrient utilization efficiency were recorded from the feeding trials. Results showed that the post-larval shrimp fed diet containing 150 g kg-1 AFP exhibited significantly better (p<0.05) growth rate (14.79 mg d-1 post-larva-1), feed conversion ratio (1.62), protein efficiency ratio (1.64) and apparent protein utilization (25.39) than the other diets. The diet with 350 g kg-1 AFP showed the best apparent protein digestibility (87.74 %), apparent fat digestibility (97.95 %) and apparent dry matter digestibility coefficient (77.09 %) among the test diets. The results of the present study suggest that AFP can be used to improve the digestibility of nutrients and that partial replacement of fishmeal is possible in P. monodon post-larval diets under optimum rearing conditions.