With that said, I had a nice little tidbit of information in lecture the other day.
In trout and other salmonids it takes 330 grams of protein from a modern hatchery formulated diet to produce 1 pound of fish.
I thought that most of the fish food had a higher conversion rate than natural forage.
A natural forage diet however only takes 143 grams of protein in order to produce 1 pound of fish.
What does that tell us when we are talking about fish we currently know the most about nutritionally (followed closely by catfish of course)?
Is this specific to "trout and other salmonids" or does this principal hold true LMB, BG and other more commonly used pond species?
What
does this tell us when we are talking about fish we currently know the most about nutritionally?
I guess I should be able to draw some form of conclusions here but am having trouble connecting the dots.
Well Jeffhasapond,
that data is specific to only trout and other salmonids; however, the one thing that I take away from it is that if we can not even get the science of nutrition zero'd in properly on the species of fish we know the most about nutrition wise in aquaculture, then we sure as hell don't know jack about LMB, Bluegill, or other game fish (excluding catfish, trout and salmonids).
What this tells me is that there is loads of room for improvement, and the commercial feeds will keep getting better and better as time goes on.
From what I have gathered, the main obstacle to better nutrition is going to be Money. Scientists live off of research grants, and because LMB are treated more like the family dog than a serious big money food item for human consumption, the quality of the feed is going to be sub-par in comparison to catfish and salmonid diets.
The equine industry has a similar problem believe it or not. Sure, it is big money, and people take good care of their horses, but we are not eating them in the U.S.
There more than likely will not be significant advances made in equine nutrition until horses are put into a feedlot type situation and become as commercially important as swine, or cattle. There needs to be a reason for the big wigs with the deep-pockets to invest in that research.
My guess is that the extent of LMB nutrition currently is just trying to formulate the diet of a trout as closely as possible. For a lot of our game species nutritionists may be just applying information across species.
We do this a lot with exotic species. We figure that if a horse eats this much feed, then a zebra probably eats a similar amount. Sometimes the best we can do is take educated guesses.
Aquaculture as a growing industry, despite being around for thousands of years, is really in its infancy. It really hadn't started to get big until around 2 1/2 decades ago.
And Ewest,
You are 100% right. It takes much less energy to eat a pellet than to chase down a baitfish. I view supplemental feeding as extremely important. I'm just interested in how much more efficient we will become in feed efficiency and conversion as we start to close the nutritional gap between natural prey and formulated diets. I think we could really create some monsters in a very short period of time.
