Apparent digestibility of nutrients and energy of conventional ingredients for the silver mojarra, Diapterus rhombeus

Knowledge on the nutritional value of feed ingredient is an important step in the formulation of diets in order to maximize animal productivity. Thus a study was conducted to determine the apparent digestibility coefficients (ADC) of dry matter (ADCDM), crude protein (ADCCP), gross energy (ADCGE) and amino acids (ADCAA) of conventional feed ingredients for juvenile silver mojarra (13.0 +/- 3.23 g). The study was conducted in the laboratory for nutrition and feeding of fish (AQUANUT), using 80 silver mojarra collected in nature, which were kept in digestibility aquaria for a period of 21 days. The following ingredients were evaluated: fish meal, soybean meal, corn meal, corn gluten meal, rice bran, wheat bran and starch, which substituted 30% of a reference pelletized diet with 325.00 g kg(-1) crude protein and 3,692 Kcal kg(-1) gross energy. Additionally 1.0 g kg(-1) chrome oxide was added to each diet as a marker. The excreta were obtained using three repetitions for each tested ingredient, which were dried for further analyses. The soybean meal showed the best ADCDM value (67.45%), followed by the other ingredients. There was no significant difference between the soybean meal (95.16%), fish meal (92.97%) and the corn meal (91.90%) for the best ADCCP coefficients. The ADCGE for soybean meal and maize meal were 65.23% and 60.31%, respectively, followed by fish meal (51.85%). The results demonstrate that silver mojarra can digest animal protein as well as that of vegetal origin. Silver mojarra can also efficiently digest and absorb some of the main amino acids of fish, such as lysine, methionine and threonine, from the same studied ingredients.