Challenges and solutions to feeding some of the smallest aquatic vertebrates on the planet.

Growing human populations and increased per capita consumption are going to require new and innovative methods for growing food in the future. One area of potential expansion is marine aquaculture, which includes a variety of activities including finfish, shellfish and algae. With respect to marine finfish, one of the major challenges is producing sufficient quantities of high quality juveniles, a bottleneck that occurs in the larval phase. Marine fish larvae are challenging to culture in captivity for a number of reasons, several of which relate to larval nutrition. Like all animals, marine fish larvae require a full suite of essential nutrients, including many that are water-soluble. The problem is that water-soluble nutrients may be rapidly lost from artificial diets into the water before the fish can eat them. One solution to this problem is to encapsulate water-soluble nutrients within microparticles that can protect the nutrients from the surrounding water until they are consumed by the fish or other target animals. In this presentation, I will discuss some of the ways in which we’ve used microencapsulation techniques to improve the delivery of dietary components to marine fish larvae as well as promote feeding behavior in fish.