The effects of changing feeding frequency simultaneously with seawater transfer in Atlantic salmon Salmo salar L.smolt

• Published in: Aquaculture International
• Main Authors: Flood, MJ, Purser, GJ, Carter, CG
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Kluwer Academic Publ 2012
• Subjects: Agricultural; Veterinary and Food Sciences; Fisheries sciences; Aquaculture; Atlantic salmon; Salmo salar
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10499-011-9439-7; http://ecite.utas.edu.au/74415

The effects on group feed intake and growth performance of changing feedingfrequency simultaneously with seawater transfer of Atlantic salmon Salmo salar wereinvestigated. Two feeding regimes of one feed per day (1F) and eight feeds per day (8F)were compared for groups of Atlantic salmon in freshwater. Following seawater transfergroups were either fed on their pre-transfer regimes or swapped to the other regime,resulting in four treatments ( n = 3). Regardless of the pre-transfer feeding regime, 1Fgroups had significantly ( P < 0.05) lower feed intake immediately following transfer than8F groups. However, groups that underwent a change in feeding frequency did not havesignificantly lower feed intake immediately following transfer than those kept on the pretransferfeeding regime. During the freshwater phase, overall mean feed intake of 8Fgroups was significantly greater than 1F groups, whilst there was no significant differencein mean feed intake for any of the treatments during the seawater phase. Growth was betterin groups fed 8F in freshwater than those fed 1F in freshwater regardless of post-transferfeeding regime. There were no significant differences in growth depensation throughoutthe experiment, suggesting that there were no overall differences in hierarchy strengthamongst treatments. The main finding of this experiment was that a single meal per dayimmediately following seawater transfer results in initially significantly lower feed intakethan the higher feeding frequency regardless of pre-transfer feeding regime, consequentlymultiple daily feeds is the recommended feeding regime following seawater transfer.