Study On The Artificial Feed For The Juvenile Sea Cucumber

In recent years, sea cucumber aquaculture industry developed rapidly in China with the increasing demand for sea cucumber. Meanwhile, the requirements of sea cucumber feed become more and more, the standards get higher and higher. However, the researches on sea cucumber nutrition are deficient, the costs of artificial feed are high and the industry lack the standard denominators. All these situations induced the current sea cucumber feed market confused, and the feed industry developed slowly. The healthy development of sea cucumber aquaculture were restricted seriously. Therefore, it is very necessary to perform the studies on artificial feed of sea cucumber.Considering some problems existed in juveniles sea cucumber aquaculture, we mainly invested protein content of feed, adding of compound organic calcium and immunoglobulin, alternative materials in feed in this research. The survival rate and growth rate of juvenile sea cucumber were calculate and analyzed, in order to evaluate the difference of the various feed.The results show that:1) The addition of 22% protein in the artificial feed would stimulate the sea cucumber weight significantly. And, following the lasting of feeding time, growth-promoting effect of added protein were more obvious.2) When 0.5% compound organic calcium were added, feeding time was longer than 2 months, the growth rate and weight gain for the sea cucumber would be obvious.3) Immunoglobulin can significantly improve the weight and ensure its survival rate of juvenile sea cucumber, and the proportion should be more than 0.3%.4) 10% of peanut seedling and 20% of Enteromorpha prolifera were indicated to be part of the feed raw materials as a cheap alternative substitute. Both of the materials can significantly increase the sea cucumber's weight gain and improve their survival remarkably.These results can be concluded that protein content of feed and trace elements (compound organic calcium and immunoglobulin) in sea cucumber feed will impact the growth and survival of sea cucumber. Peanut seedling and Enteromorpha prolifera can be considered as alternative raw materials to replace some part of the sea cucumber feed.With the sea cucumber aquaculture industry continues to grow, problem of artificial feed is becoming a bottleneck in its development. Artificial feed of juvenile sea cucumber need to be explored extensively and verified repeatedly. This study provided some useful data and support for the further research and development on artificial feed of sea cucumber.