Abstract
Feed management practices significantly impact the production performance of tilapia (Oreochromis species) culture economically; hence, adopting appropriate feed management strategies is vital to maximize returns. The advancement in aquaculture has also allowed an advancement in the development formulated feeds to supplement or replace natural feeds. Farmers are now able to prepare their own fish feeds from locally available ingredients. Hence, feed ingredient evaluation is crucial for better development of appropriate diets for different aquaculture species as well as nutritional research. Therefore, this review used secondary data to evaluate the different strategies employed for better utilization of nutrients in feed by providing a discussion of functional feed additives used in aquafeeds such as the addition of enzymes, pre/probiotics, feeding stimulants, and use of hormones. Supplementation of diet with xynalase and phytase enzymes ( P < 0.001 ) and probiotics ( P < 0.05 ) improved growth (g/d) and FCR when applied individually. The combination of enzymes and probiotics showed an interaction effect ( P < 0.05 ) on growth and FCR. A detailed discussion of feed ingredient processing strategies like fermentation, heat treatment, germination, and other biological methods meant to improve the nutritional quality of the feed and minimize antinutritional factors is provided. Furthermore, information on how genetic selection is being used to enhance feed utilization in tilapia fish is provided. The food conversion efficiency was found to be significantly higher ( P < 0.05 ) in transgenic tilapia compared to the nontransgenic red tilapia fish with average weight ± SD of 384 ± 158 g and 314 ± 101 for transgenic fish and red tilapia, respectively, after 275 days of culture. The review further outlines the feed formulation challenges, and research gaps in tilapia nutrition. It was noted that proper feeding management strategies are very critical for the sustainability of tilapia aquaculture. In conclusion, dietary sources for tilapia are slowly shifting to plant-based products. However, these come with a lot of antinutritional factors and digestibility problems; hence, the right feeding strategies have to be employed to enable efficient nutrient utilization. The review discovered that there are a lot of strategies which employed research gaps in tilapia nutrition, especially on nutrient utilization of feed and feed formulation.
Highlights
Tilapia are omnivorous fishes from the cichlid family native to Africa and have been widely introduced all over the world either accidentally or deliberately [1]
Of all these tilapia species, Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) is the most commonly farmed with over 4:5 million metric tons ± SD of fishes produced per year in 2018 (Figure 1) [3] and produced in more than 100 countries [2]
The results indicated that enzyme supplementation in wheat bran and sunflower meal diets improved the growth rate of fish and the digestibility of ash, phosphorus, calcium, and nonstarch polysaccharides, whilst the performance of fish fed citrus pulp and reference diet did not improve
Summary
Tilapia are omnivorous fishes from the cichlid family native to Africa and have been widely introduced all over the world either accidentally or deliberately [1]. It is important that every feeding strategy employed is nutritionally efficient to minimize feed wastage and deterioration of water quality [5, 6] This can be done by assessing information on nutrient utilization to estimate the efficiency as this varies upon the fish species and the farming system [7]. Previous reviews [14,15,16,17] have examined alternative sources of nutrients in the tilapia diets Most of these studies only focused on certain aspects of nutrition, and since they were done a couple of years back, they do not cover the new developments in dietary strategies that have occurred over the years. Most research has been directed towards the nutrient requirements and feeding strategies of fish; additional information is needed to better understand how efficient these dietary strategies are in terms of nutrient utilization by fish
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