Aquatic animals are highly adaptable, requiring around 40 essential nutrients that can be sourced from various raw materials, including marine ingredients, animal products, grains, and novel sources. This adaptability is crucial to the industry's growth and will allow for diverse feed formulations.
Changing feed formulas can be challenging, as new materials must meet stringent requirements to maintain growth, feed conversion rates, robustness, health, and welfare. Fishmeal, for example, is highly stable and rich in digestible protein and essential amino acids, making it an important part of the diet. Successful replacement of fishmeal with plant-based proteins requires careful nutrient supplementation, such as amino acids, to avoid growth and welfare issues.
Marine oils, another key component, supply essential omega-3 fatty acids like EPA and DHA, which are critical for maintaining robustness and immune health under modern farming conditions. Replacing these oils with alternatives requires careful supplementation of fat-soluble vitamins. BioMar’s R&D team has gained extensive knowledge in transitioning from marine ingredients to processed animal products, plant-based proteins, and more recently, novel sources.
Microalgae
Single-cell marine algae, have successfully supplemented marine fish oils, providing essential DHA and EPA fatty acids. After over 10 years of research, BioMar found that algal oils can fully replace fish oil with no negative impact on growth, feed conversion, or product quality across different species and farming stages.
Algal oil has been used in salmon, shrimp, and marine fish feeds, achieving commercial scale with over 4 million tonnes of BioMar feed sold containing this novel oil source while prices remained competitive compared to other DHA and EPA sources.
Insect Meals
Other novel raw material sources are following a larger-scale commercial implementation, trials have shown that insect meals can be included at high levels of protein replacement, with no adverse effects. Freshwater salmon fed insect meal have demonstrated strong growth and robustness, potentially benefiting from a nutrient profile similar to their natural prey.
Larger, full commercial scale validation trials are now underway, at a number of customer sites. Shrimp and marine fish have similarly shown good feed intake and survival rates.
Single-cell Proteins
Single-cell proteins, including bacterial meals, fungi, and yeast, are being studied by BioMar's innovation team. Yeast protein has shown strong performance at 20% inclusion with no differences observed in growth or feed conversion. In addition to growth performance, these single-cell protein sources contain important cell wall components like b-glucans, mannan oligosaccharides, lipopolysaccharides, and peptidoglycan. These compounds can potentially stimulate immune responses over long-term feeding, influencing immune and physiological pathways.
Advanced techniques such as transcriptomics, metabolomics, microbiota analysis, and histology have been used to assess these factors. So far, results have shown no unwanted upregulation of the immune system, and single-cell proteins are proving promising for long-term feeding.
The ability of fed aquatic species to derive nutrients from a wide range of sources is driving a dynamic and diverse raw material basket for aquafeeds. As the aquaculture industry continues to grows the demand for both existing and novel raw materials will rise. These new nutrients sources are not only essential but are proving to be highly beneficial in supporting the health, welfare and robustness of aquatic species.