Transcript – Novel Feed Ingredients for a Sustainable Canadian Finfish Aquaculture – AquaNet

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Justin Henry, As the industry grows, we have to ensure that that growth is sustainable, and part of that will be sourcing proteins and oils for the feed

David Higgs, The trick to using these alternative lipids sources is to make sure that the essential fatty acid needs of the salmon and marine species are satisfied. by having some marine oil present in the diet; either from the fishmeal component of the diet or from a supplemental source.

Jason Mann, We saw the potential that Canada could not only become self-sufficient for fish meal and fish oil substitutes, but Canada could become an exporter of these substitute products

Narrator, A balanced, nutritious diet for good health is just as important for fish as it is for human beings. So what do you feed farmed fish such as salmon, cod or halibut to ensure they are healthy and of high quality? Developing balanced, efficient and cost effective diets is key to the success of Canada's salmon aquaculture and its development of other finfish cultures. With the rapid growth of the global aquaculture industry, the pressure on these fisheries for feeds has been mounting. In response, Canada's finfish aquaculture sector is working with AquaNet researchers to find additional sources of high quality feed ingredients that are economical, safe and nutritious.

David Higgs, What really started it was recognition in the 1970's following a major El Nino event in the early 1970s was ..that there could be future shortages of fish meal and fish oil for formulated diets forsalmon, trout and several carnivorous finfish species. And this led into the salmonid enhancement program and a lot of focus on the development of diets which for optimizingse the performance of hatchery juveniles and also their marine survival.

Narrator, This was the beginning of publicly funded research in Canada into developing and optimizing new feed ingredients for finfish aquaculture, complementing research carried out by multi-national feed companies.

David Higgs, We then started to then look at the impacts of using these alternative lipids and proteins on the survival of the fish in the wild. This is where we found that a combination of vegetable oilcorn oil and herring oil, either alone or in a combination with herring oil, actually promoted better marine survival of the Chinooks that were released from a hatchery environment than just using herring oil alone.

But we did not know the physiological mechanisms for this. So AquaNet was able to fund research to look at why a combination of vegetable oil and fish oil promoted better marine survival of Chinook.

Scott McKinley, AquaNet is a Network of Centres of Excellence in aquaculture. It's a brainchild of Industry Canada. It allows us to bring the expertise on the East coast and integrate it with the expertise on the West Coast on aquaculture issues. In this case integrate expertise ion alternate feeds and feed technology from the east, central Canada, and the west coast.

AquaNet's long term vision is to have widespread Canadian support for an aquaculture sector. Development of alternate feeds that are - one that is less reliant on a wild forageing crops component [pelagic fish species] and more reliant on readily available vegetable oil [and protein] will contribute to the wide public acceptance of an aquaculture sector in Canada and hence AquaNet's vision. and our researchers have the expertise to do this.

Jason Mann, Canadian companies have to try to develop products that are available in North America, both Canada and the United States, so closer to home., [We need to].buy products or specially developing products that are available to us in the future,. will be available to us that we can use in fish feed instead of fish meal and fish oil.

We do need to grow our own ingredients; to for our products make them available from our own local sources. and. .. Oonce we get industrializsed in producing these alternate oil and proteins and oils, there should be better pricing on the feed costs.

The future research requirements in our industry will likely focus on matching the finfish nutrient requirements with what is available as far as nutrient availability, from the new ingredients that are developed as a result of the research this work that we are doing [within], AquaNet and the research groups.

When you spend a dollar on research and we can make the savings even a small percentage in feed cost, it is still you have millions of dollars in cost savings for our industry.

Justin Henry, Alternate oils are important to for the industry to supplement traditional oils.. This It will allow us to optimize diets for refine diets for fish health, and for production, and new species of fish that we culture. It will allow us to increase the spectrum of available oils and proteins, . Iand in the long run have a lower cost feed. 

Narrator, So researchers at the University of British Columbia have looked at the health effects of different diets for traditional and new Pacific aquaculture species, such as chinook salmon and sablefish.

Patricia Schulte, As part of their natural life cycle, a salmon transfers from freshwater to saltwater. and Wwhat we are really interested in doing is asking the question of how the alternate diet affects this normal stage in the life cycle of a salmon. And so what happens to the fish when they travel from freshwater to seawater is some of the[sodium from] salt in the seawater tries to enter the fish'ss ' body and the fish tries to fights against that, - tries to keep it out or tries to pump out the saltwater [saltwater] back out that comes in. That process happens across the membranes of the fish's cells. Those membranes are made up of the lipids or oils that we feed the fish. So the different diets that we feed the fish may affect their membranes and that affects their ability to move seawater[sodium] in and out of their body.   

Colin Brauner, So what we have here is a large swim tunnel.

We start them at a low swimming velocity and every half hour we increase the velocity up until they can't maintain their position in the water column which we call fatigue. At that point, tThe animals are removed, allowed to recover for an hour and put back in the swim tunnel for a repeat swim. Generally, happy, healthy fish can repeat swim very well. So it's a good indicator of the overall physical condition and exercise capacity of the fish.  

Shannon Balfry, The oils that you put in the fish feeds contain fatty acids and the fatty acids in the feed can enhance impact the immune system by either enhancing or suppressing its activity and therefore the disease resistance of the fish can be affected by the lipids that are by putting in alternate oils in their diet.

I am mostly interested in looking sampling at the blood, the number of blood cells, the white cell number and the red blood cells. Some of the components that are in the blood are that aiding or destroying pathogens and improving disease resistance

Feeding the fish these alternate lipids, we are not finding any real find no differences that we can attribute to their diets.

Colin Brauner,The amazing really interesting thing is, these animals have been now reared on a diet for about 5 months so far and we have seen very little difference among dietary oils and lipids.

Animals [that are fed] 100 per cent canola oil as a supplementary lipid or 100 per cent anchovy oil as a supplementary lipid swim equally well.s also early in the program and we have more analyses to do... 

Narrator, Meanwhile AquaNet researchers in Atlantic Canada have focused on feeds for Atlantic salmon and new culture species such as haddock, halibut and cod.

Santosh Lall, We have practically no or very limited information on the nutritional requirements for these fish species.One of the major challenges is that we are dealing with six different fish species..

What we found by restricting the use of vegetable oil sources like flax seed oil and, canola oil, to the early stage of growth and development, and introducing the marine fish oil at the later stages of the feeding, can maintain the proper fatty acid profile of fish flesh. This phased feeding program has allowed us to maintain proper flesh quality as well as the proper nutritional value of farmed fish.

We can replace as much as 70% of the marine fish oil in the diet of new species as well as Atlantic salmon and trout l without compromising growth, affecting feed efficiency or health of these fish as well as the product quality

Narrator, For Brian Blanchard at Scotian Halibut in Clark's Harbour, NS, AquaNet's research has been a vital component in developing a halibut culture operation.

Brian Blanchard, Halibut, of all the marine speciest, is probably the most difficult species to culture of all the marine species. To get them through the hatchery phase is very, very difficult.

If we can come up with a 500-600 micron particle which was a complete diet for halibut, we would try to do that. These are the areas where we have been looking over time. A lot of the problem is making the food diets that are that small and making sure they have a balanced complement is technically very challenging And the industry isn't large enough for the feed industry to invest in this area. So we are relying on the research community to do the work. to find out what it is what we need.

AquaNet has been very nice in that it has been able to help us address through student projects a number of issues which we are facing in nutrition.  

Dulce Martins, We are focusing on the When we are working with fish this size, we are interested in the quality of the fish for the consumer. We are collecting samples of muscles that we will are going to analyse in the lab, in this case the composition of fatty acids.

Carol Walbourne, AquaNet has given me the opportunity to be more directly involved with the industry, as well as given me venues to display portray my research and getting some feedback,  at the conferences . as well as offer workshops that teach us skills we might not actually learn through our research.

Narrator, Replacing fish meal and fish oils with alternate sources also helps to eliminate environmental contaminants from the fish's diet while maintaining the beneficial fatty acids for human health.

Grant Vandenberg, Different sources of For developing diets where we replace different sources of vegetable oil, either soya bean oil, canola oil and algae based highly unsaturated fatty acids, Oils can be used to replace protein. ,T and that's a less expensive component of the diet. What you are doing is amplifying the potential contaminant problem by putting in a lot of [fish] oils. So if we can bump up the protein level and reduce the oil level; perhaps that is an interesting strategy to reduce the contaminant load.

Secondly, we are trying to replace the marine fish oil with vegetable oils - you'll also shift the levels of beneficial fatty acids in the final product. So you get a change - a reduction - in the levels of highly unsaturated fatty acids, which are beneficial to human health. What we are trying to do is to bring in a finishing period where we re-introduce higher fish oil levels.

Narrator, Replacing imported fish meal and oil with readily available oil seed crops from the Canadian prairies provides promising new opportunities for developing new value-added products for Canada's abundant crops and is potentially a cost effective and suitable source of both proteins and oils for fish feeds.

Murray Drew, What we are specifically trying to find out is how some of the crops that grow here in Saskatchewan and across Western Canada fit into aquaculture diets.

We have three different areas that we are interested in: First would be the nutrition of fish, particularly salmonid fish.. Secondly, we would be looking at replacing fish oil and fish meal , can we still produce a fish ..with the same fatty acid composition, with the same carcass quality; and lastly, we are looking at the effects of replacing fish meal and fish oil with prairie feed ingredients on the levels of contaminants present in the fish carcass.

What is unique is that we have a large facility in intestinal microbiology and intestinal gene expression . In addition to the nutrient expression of these crops we are looking at their microbiological populations in the gut of the fish and that will lead us to what is the health status of the fish..

In terms of production of prairie crops we are looking for high value uses of prairie crops. such as canola concentrates, long de-hulled flax, etc . that would provide employment and economic development here in Saskatchewan.

We have funds from producers, the canola producers, the flax seed producers, they all fund us.. But AquaNet does allow us to leverage that money and get more. and really have a much larger impact than we would have otherwise. 

Narrator, Jason Skinner, manager of the farmer owned Northwest Terminal in Unity, works closely with Dr. Drew to develop new applications and markets and help maintain healthy farming communities in rural Saskatchewan.

Jason Skinner, We are exporting commodities rather than products and I think it is very important for us that we find ways to add value to our commodities in in the prairies and find, applications here domestically in terms of the aquaculture markets.

We are in a real difficult situation in terms of the cost of production and price of our inputs, the goal is to bring back more value to the farm gate and this type of research allows us to do that.  

Narrator, The long term goal is to successfully culture a diversity of species on a commercial and economically viable scale, based on locally sourced diets that ensure healthy fish, high product quality and make Canada an exporter of high quality aaquaculture feeds based on abundant prarie products.

Justin Henry, At Target Marine, we culture 3 species of salmon, as well as white sturgeon, and in the past we cultured sablefish as well. And aAs part of developing culture techniques for new species, such as sturgeon and sablefish, we have to develop feeds as well as ensure that the feeds we are using are optimised for these fish in terms of the health and performance of the fish and the product quality.

Jason Mann, I like to see diets that are entirely based on Canadian content, that are being developed from ingredients that are raised in the prairies and the by-product industry, from the food industry; diets that look at the whole range of energy content, low energy, medium energy and very high energy feeds. I also like to see the fish farming industry move to more species development of fish, because we are focusing on the salmonid family in Canada. There has been work done in alternate species and there needs to be more work done in that area.

We need to make sure that we have a choice of a longer list of different proteins and oils, not just count on a few. By that I mean looking at all the classes, such as . canola, soy bean, legumes, peas, flax, beans and among other grain and oil seeds as well., just to name a fewThese different families will become the basis for future diets. And when you look at the poultry and other industries, they have done a similar thing, except that they had a 60 year head start. When can learn a lot of things from the other life stock industries, as well as the human food industry.

Patricia Schulte, Our long term goal in this research is to develop a diet that would be cost effective and be good for the fish., that would produce a good product and also maintain the health and welfare of the animals. We hope to learn more how diets affect fish and help us achieve a basic science goal of learning more about how fish interact with their diets and their environment.