Nutrient digestibility for juvenile silver perch Bidyanus bidyanus: development of methods

Ingredient apparent digestibility coefficients for the Australian short-finned eel (Anguilla australis australis, Richardson)

“…For example, previous studies have also used the same time-frame for the collection of faeces in digestibility studies with eels (de Silva et al, 2000;Tibbetts et al, 2000). In contrast to findings by Watanabe et al (1996), Allan et al (1999) demonstrated that prolonged collection (18 h following previous meal) of faeces in collectors when held in ice caused negligible leaching of dry matter and protein.…”

“…To minimize the breakage and leaching of nutrients from faeces that may result in a significant overestimation of digestibility coefficients, modified Guelph-type of settlement collectors held in crushed ice were used in the present study. Because similar digestibility coefficients for eels (Schmitz et al, 1984) and other fish species like the Australian silver perch (Allan et al, 1999) and trout (Yamamoto et al, 1998) were reported for the same type of ingredient using almost similar or exactly the same type of collection technique to the present study, the validity of the technique could be supported by being comparable to other studies. For example, previous studies have also used the same time-frame for the collection of faeces in digestibility studies with eels (de Silva et al, 2000;Tibbetts et al, 2000).…”

“…The stripping and dissection of the anterior or posterior sections of the intestinal tract were demonstrated to be an ineffective faecal collection method with smaller sizes of fish (Cho et al, 1982;Allan et al, 1999). Settlement allows digestibility to be measured with smaller fish and causes minimal disturbance to faeces during collection.…”

Apparent protein and energy digestibility of common and alternative feed ingredients by Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua (Linnaeus, 1758)

“…If this assumption is true, then the calculated (or predicted) protein ADC or DE content of a test diet and the actual measured protein ADC or DE content of the test diet would always be the same. This assumption has been tested and validated for other species like rainbow trout, channel catfish, carp, tilapia, ayu, seabass, Australian silver perch and Australian shortfinned eel (Cho et al, 1982;Wilson and Poe, 1985;Cho and Kaushik, 1990;Watanabe et al, 1996a,b;da Silva and Oliva-Teles, 1998;Allan et al, 1999;Engin and Carter, 2002) but yet to be validated for Atlantic cod. We compared the predicted and measured values in order to test this assumption using a wide range of test feed ingredients (Tables 5 and 6).…”

True and apparent digestibility of protein and amino acids of feed in Nile tilapia

“…Moreover, there is a great variability in the results, and this variation may be related to environmental conditions, such as water temperature (Bendiksen et al, 2003) and dissolved oxygen concentration in the aquarium (Neiji et al, 1993) and methodological factors, as the time of feces collection (Allan et al, 1999), the technique of feces collection (Austreng, 1978, Windell et al, 1978 and fish size (Henken et al, 1985).…”