Intensive fish production leads to multiple situations that alter the welfare of the fish (high stocking densities, animal handling, etc.) due to the stress they cause. This stress causes food intake to be significantly reduced and, in situations of acute stress, strongly conditions production since the animals do not eat at all, completely losing the food supplied.
In addition to the economic loss that uneaten food entails, additional treatment of fish farm effluents is required, in order to minimize the environmental impact generated. All this means that food accounts for 70% of the cost of intensive fish farming. Reducing this cost would only be possible by optimizing intake. If the mechanisms that determine whether a fish eats or not are known, and how these mechanisms are altered in stressful situations, it will be possible to adapt the availability of food to the needs of the fish at each moment of the production cycle and thus reduce costs and improve animal welfare.
Food intake in fish is a tremendously complex process involving a central system, which integrates metabolic, endocrine, neuroendocrine and circadian information, and a peripheral system, the main regulator of satiety, which also interact with the mechanisms involved in the stress response. To date, only some of the mechanisms involved are known. The Fish Physiology group, belonging to the Oceano-Ecimat Group, has as its main challenge to continue obtaining basic knowledge about all these mechanisms in order to improve the efficiency of fish feeding in aquaculture.
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