Dietary Soybean Lecithin Enhances Growth Performance, Feed Utilization Efficiency and Body Composition of Early Juvenile Milkfish, Chanos chanos

Abstract

The study was conducted to evaluate the influence of dietary soybean lecithin (SBL) on the growth performance, feed utilization, and survival of early juvenile milkfish. Five experimental diets containing increasing levels of SBL (0 g, 0.75 g, 1.5 g, 3.0 g and 6.0 g/100 g diet) were formulated and fed to triplicate groups of early juvenile milkfish (≈ 9.0 mg) for 50 days. Results showed that dietary lecithin inclusion improved Weight Gain (WG), Specific Growth Rate (SGR), Survival, Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR) and Protein Efficiency Ratio (PER) of milkfish juvenile. Polynomial regression analysis showed that the optimum dietary level of SBL to promote optimum growth in milkfish early juvenile is 3.56g/100g diet. Beyond this inclusion level, growth performance indices tend to decline. Higher carcass total protein and lipid contents were observed in treatment groups fed diets with optimum inclusion levels of SBL compared to the other treatments. Collectively the findings suggest that incorporating SBL at an optimum dose of 3.56g/100g diet enhances survival, overall growth performance, and improves carcass composition of early juvenile milkfish. Dietary SBL inclusion could be a practical approach in improving the efficiency of juvenile milkfish nursery production to meet the requirements of the expanding cage aquaculture production systems.