Black Soldier Fly Fed to Sturgeon Juveniles: Digestibility and Whole Body Composition

The World Aquaculture Society will hold its conference August 25-29 in Montpelier, France. Like most conferences, it will have a blend of research presentations, vendors, investors, processors, and educators present.  If you have a chance- and you are in the area, I suspect this will be a nice conference to attend. 

​Abstracts for the conference are now being posted.  The nice thing about these abstracts is you can access them online with no apparent restrictions (please let me know if I am wrong.

One such abstract popped up on my radar this past week, and I thought I would share it with you.

BLACK SOLDIER FLY FED TO STURGEON Acipenser baerii JUVENILES: DIGESTIBILITY AND WHOLE BODY COMPOSITION
The study was conducted by my friend and colleague, Dr. Laura Gasco with the Department of Agricultural, Forest, and Food Sciences, University of Torino in Italy.

In this study, they examined the development of sturgeon juveniles (like the title says) fed diets with 25 and 50% fishmeal replacement with BSF.  Based on the abstract, it appears the BSF can be used as a replacement. The abstract contains a nice table comparing the data generated from the study. So, you can actually see where the differences are between the diets and their impact on the fish.

The authors do also raise the question regarding chitin (I embedded a link to Wikipedia where you can read about chitin and its role in nature) and digestibility. I am not aware of anyone doing any extensive work to address this question; however, it does appear to be one raised by a host of researchers in the field. 

I am by no means an expert on chitin; however, I had a discussion with a colleague at a PetFood Forum in Kansas City, Missouri, USA this past week (yes- a lot of interest in the use of insects for pet food), and he astutely pointed out that chitin represents such a low percentage (extremely low) of the overall insect matter- does it really matter? I raise this question to you- consider this point and let me know what you think? I welcome discussion. 

Author

Jeff Tomberlin, PhD, BSF nutritionist of sorts
Director, EVO Conversion Systems
Twitter: @FliesFacility