Evaluation of dietary taurine concentrations in microparticulate diets provided to larval California yellowtail (Seriola dorsalis ) postlarvae

Abstract

Taurine is an important amino acid derivative for marine and freshwater fish, especially during early development. We investigated the range of taurine concentrations that influence the growth and survival rates of California yellowtail (CYT; Seriola dorsalis) during transition from live feeds to microparticulate diets, as well as the extent to which nutrient leaching from the microparticulate diets affects these ranges. We tested particle‐assisted rotationally agglomerated (PARA) particles with four levels of taurine: 4 (low taurine; LT), 45 (medium taurine; MT), 93 (high taurine; HT) and 122 g/kg (very high taurine; VHT). Our results showed that CYT postlarvae had no significant differences in growth, survival and feed consumption rates between the MT, HT and VHT treatments. However, it should be noted that the PARA particles containing 122 g/kg (VHT) taurine were especially prone to leaching and may have had taurine concentrations as low as 34.9 g/kg before they settled on the bottom of the tank. Therefore, the actual dietary taurine concentrations experienced by the larvae were likely lower than the initial dietary concentrations. More research is needed to evaluate the potential nutrient toxicity of elevated dietary taurine concentrations for marine fish larvae and juveniles.

Roles of dietary taurine in fish nutrition

“…Satriyo et al (2017) suggested that a minimum level of 0.45% of taurine is required in the diet with washed fishmeal as a main protein source to normalize the physiological conditions of juvenile totoaba, namely green liver, low gallbladder-somatic index (GBSI), low plasma total cholesterol, low lipid digestibility, low erythrocyte turnover and low visceral fat content. With most of the cases utilizing more content than the optimal level, dietary taurine has no or negative effects on fish (Hu et al 2018b;Stuart et al 2018;Zheng et al 2016). So, the current knowledge about the optimum dietary taurine levels is highly important for aquaculture as well as for future research.…”

“…Excessive dietary taurine (2%) had negative effects on survival, growth and the enzyme activities (Zheng et al 2016). However, even 12.2% of dietary taurine had no significant negative effects on the growth, survival and feed consumption rates of California yellowtail (Seriola dorsalis) postlarvae (Stuart et al 2018). Certainly, more research is needed to evaluate the potential nutrient toxicity of elevated dietary taurine concentrations for fish larvae.…”

“…Taurine deficiency may lead to poor growth performance, green liver syndrome and psychological abnormalities of fish fed with fish meal-free diets (Takagi et al 2008). Moreover, there are many primary responses of fish that have been identified involving dietary taurine supplementation and include survival rate (Rotman et al 2017), growth performance (Poppi et al 2018;Zhang et al 2018), feed utilization (Al-Feky et al 2016b;Ferreira et al 2014;Peterson and Li 2018;Salze et al 2018b;Satriyo et al 2017), body composition (Hernandez et al 2018;Hoseini et al 2017), whole body taurine (Hoseini et al 2018;Salze et al 2018a;Stuart et al 2018), anti-oxidative capacity (Abdel-Tawwab and Monier 2018;Zhang et al 2018), immune response (Khaoian et al 2014;Kim et al 2017;Koven et al 2016;López et al 2015;Nguyen et al 2015;Richard et al 2017;Zhang et al 2019), cellular and metabolic responses (Feidantsis et al 2014), hyperplasia muscle growth (Sampath et al 2020), egg fertilization (Sarih et al 2019) and reproductive performance (Al-Feky et al 2016a;Guimaraes et al 2018). Taurine is a vital ingredient in fish nutrition, especially when feeding with plant protein-based diets.…”