Objectives
- Development of cost-efficient technique for processing mussel meal.
- Biochemical analysis of different types of mussel meal.
- Growth and digestibility tests of mussel meal in fish feed.
- Evaluation of mussel meal as ingredient in fish feed in aquaculture.
Tasks
Develop cost-efficient techniques for processing mussels into meal
The partner GRAINAS is in the final stage of developing promising and up-scalable equipment to develop a cost-efficient method to process mussel meal to fish feed. Farmed mussels from WP3 will be processed into two types of meal, with or without byssus, at GRAINAS where the mussels will be dried after optimizing the newly developed and not yet commercially used steamdrying technique.
The resulting meal products will be quality assessed in terms of proximate composition, lipid, protein, dry matter content, amino acid profile and carotenoid content. Based on the nutritional composition meal products will substitute protein sources in feed recipes for fry and juvenile salmonids. Furthermore, processing thinshell mussels from Greifswald Bay into mussel meal (excl. shells) will be processed and analyzed.
Mussel meal as healthy feedstuff for fish
Technical University of Denmark in Hirtshals has several experimental facilities based on recirculating aquaculture system or flow through technology for conducting experiments in both freshwater and seawater. Each system has up till 18 tanks and permits testing of up to six diets in a triplicate set up. Long term growth studies will be performed with the various mussel meal products to evaluate the effect of processing, origin and inclusion levels on daily growth, feed conversion ratio, and N retention and compared with results from commercial diets.
Furthermore, fish will be sampled for analyses of the proximate composition. Fish will be analysed at start an end of the experiments together with histological examination of liver, intestinal epithelium and morphological analyses.
Digestibility of diets will be carried out in specific digestibility systems to obtain in vivo digestibility of protein, lipid, carbohydrate and DM. Following digestibility studies nitrogen excretion will be measured as to evaluate protein utilization.
Partners involved
- Technical University of Denmark
- GRAINAS