The farming of aquatic organisms is divided into intensive, semi-intensive and extensive depending on the degree of human intervention in their management, which is gradually changing from extensive to intensive farming. This intervention can be quantified in a substantial way with the intake of food from outside, the elimination of catabolites and the supply of oxygen in the farmed water.

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Knowledge of the nutritional requirements of farmed fish species, the formulation of animal feed, and the management of animal feed on the farm in recent decades has been the subject of much research, though have not yet reached the level of other species of zootechnical interest.

In the diet of fish, we began decades ago to use raw foods and by-products from the processing industry, with whole foods made from high quality raw materials. Considerable attention was then given to the management aspects of feed distribution and environmental problems, with the aim of minimizing wastage of organic matter, pollution and eutrophication of water.

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Feeding intensively farmed aquatic organisms has evolved over the past 40 years, which has greatly increased the productivity of aquaculture around the world. In the early, fish waste or whole fish was used to feed the fish. However, this practice was not very effective because it produced a large amount of waste that polluted the water considerably, making it impossible to increase the density of farmed fish, knowing that the growing demand for fish has encouraged intensive farming. The practice of using forage fish to feed farmed fish is also very risky from a health point of view, as many potentially pathogenic organisms are introduced into the livestock environment.

The next step towards optimizing fish feeding techniques has been the use of mash, made from stable ingredients such as fishmeal, vegetable flours and fish oils. Pelleted feed followed the wet feed, which had the advantage of being produced and stored on the farm, or it could be purchased from feed companies, which then began to develop diets that optimized their composition based on high species, and the size of the fish.

The latest evolution of the aquaculture diet has been the introduction of extrusion. This production technique has brought two great benefits. The first is to be able to choose the degree of floatation of the food, by acting on the density of the extrudate. This allows today to have floating granules, or semi-floating. In fact, the behavior of food in the water column is a very important aspect to support the attitudes of different species of fish to food. The second advantage provided by the extrusion process concerns the possibility of considerably increasing the lipid percentage of the food, thanks to its porosity. This has led to the formulation of high energy diets containing up to 30 to 35% lipids.

The amount of fat contained in an aquaculture feed is of great importance for the use of nutrients by high aquatic organisms. Fish, especially carnivorous species (Salmonidae), have a low digestive capacity in carbohydrates. They prefer to use proteins and fats as a source of energy. A diet capable of providing the energy needed to metabolize fish through lipids allows for a large saving of proteins, which will then be used more for growth and flesh formation, instead of energy source.

Using less protein for energy purposes is important for both:

• Have a cheaper diet, given the cost of fishmeal.
• The use of amino acids as a source of energy encourages the release of pus of nitrogenous material by fish, which has a major impact on the pollution of aquatic environments.

Aquaculture is the fastest growing zootechnic sector in the world. Its annual growth rate has been 10% in recent years. The expansion of the sector has been very rapid in recent decades, leading to an ever-increasing demand for raw materials for the production of fish feed, particularly fish-derived meals and oils. These two ingredients come mainly from the processing of small pelagic fish caught and not intended for direct human consumption. Only a marginal part of the fishmeal and fish oils used in feed formulation comes from the processing of fish waste for human consumption.

Replacing fish oils and meal with other plant-based products was also needed to address the sustainability issue by looking at the relationship between the amount of fish used in food formulation and the amount of high fish. This relationship called « fish in fish », was very unfavorable in the past, some fish production using up to 5 kg of fish caught to produce 1 kg of farmed fish. Now, thanks to progress in feeding, this ratio has been reduced for all species raised, even for strictly carnivorous species. For example, today a farmed salmon is able to grow faster, ingesting less fish for its nutrition than a specimen of the same wild species. Thanks to the genetic selection of farmed fish and the formulation of increasingly balanced feeds, the aquaculture sector is able to provide extremely efficient feed conversion indices, the best of all animals in the world.  For some species, we have indices below 1, that is, less than 1 kg of food, which contains more than 95% dry matter, is required for the growth of one kg of fish.

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