Insect larvae meal as a sustainable feed ingredient in aquaculture 2021-04-15
A recent collaboration between IATS Nutrigenomics group and CIIMAR from Porto University (Portugal) has highlighted the feasibility of high replacement of fish meal in aquaculture diets with insect-derived meal.
The effect of fish meal replacement by defatted mealworm (Tenebrio molitor) larvae meal in European sea bass aquafeeds was tested, evidencing that it was possible to replace up to 80% of fish meal by insect meal without impairing growth performance, nutrients digestibility and fillet quality.
These results are of special importance for the growing need of environmentally sustainable alternatives to fish meal in aquaculture.
The work has been partly funded by a transnational access (TNA) of H2020 project AQUAEXCEL2020 at IATS infrastructures. It was selected as a relevant output in the Info Day of EATiP at Aquaculture Europe 2019 in Berlin, and it has been recently published in the Open Access journal Frontiers in Physiology.
