Satiation meal and the effects of meal and body sizes on gastric evacuation rate in brook trout Salvelinus fontinalis fed commercial pellets.

Abstract

Gastric evacuation (GE) experiments were performed on brook trout Salvelinus fontinalis fed commercial food pellets. The experiments included small fish (36 g; 15 cm total length, LT ) fed meals of 0·2, 0·4 and 0·8 g and large fish (152 g; 23 cm) fed meals of 0·8, 2·0 and 4·0 g at temperatures ranging from 15·1 to 18·2° C. The stomach contents were thereafter sampled and weighed at 3 h intervals until the first empty stomach was observed. The course of GE was examined by use of a general power function of the data that revealed that the square-root function described the GE rate (GER) by the current stomach content mass independently of original meal size. Using the square-root function, the relationship between GER and fish size was described by a power function of fish length, whereas the effect of temperature was described by a simple exponential function. GER of the commercial pellets fed to S. fontinalis could thus be described by dStdt=-0·000464L1·31e0·052TSt (g h(-1) ), where St is stomach mass (g) at time t (h), L is total fish length (cm) and T is temperature (° C). The result of this study should provide a useful tool for planning of feeding regimes in production of S. fontinalis by optimizing growth and minimizing food waste.