According to that table ... a 36-4 catfish feed converts much better than a 38-12 trout feed for YP. They also note no better conversion from a 50-17 trout feed than a 36-4 catfish feed. All that flies into the face of a lot of the conventional wisdom here. The 40-10 trout feed had the best performance but interesting enough those treatments received more feed. So how do I know that? I just multiplied the gain by the FCR to get the weight of feed fed to each treatment. Sometimes you have to look deeper and be more skeptical. Everyone who feeds fish as living knows that conversion can be improved by increasing the feed rate (to a point after which it FCR declines). Sometimes it is good to dig deeper, read between the lines, and carefully review.

Also missing are the temperatures of the treatments. This is potentially important. I am completely ignorant of YP metabolic expenditures at various temperatures but they (like LMB) vary by temperature as does conversion of excess consumption. I didn't see any clear winner. What I can tell you is that either ALL of the feed missed the mark in terms of digestible energy (for YP) or the fish were being kept under less than optimal conditions (one factor of which might have been high metabolic needs for energy). I say this because 4.4 (the best achieved) is VERY POOR conversion of feed especially when feeding at 5.05% of body weight daily. Yes I can infer (by calculation) that feeding rate because I know how much they gained and how much they were fed.

I have a good deal of knowledge about LMB energy consumption and conversion and if I fed at 5.05% of body weight daily for 10 weeks (70 days) and got a gain like that I would compute an energy density for the feed of only 3520 J/g. That sucks. That is less than wet BG energy density. With a 40-10 estimated at 7500 J/g digestible energy I would expect an FCR of 1.73 with only 3% of body weight fed daily getting nearly 2 times the gain. But that is LMB. Anyways something must have been wrong with the feed or the conditions of the treatments resulting in less than favorable conversion.

It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so - Will Rogers