PRELIMINARY EVALUATION OF DIETARY INCLUSION OF DEFATTED BLACK SOLDIER FLY Hermetia illucens MEAL ON THE GROWTH AND FEED UTILIZATION OF GILTHEAD SEA BREAM Sparus aurata

Rising prices for feed for aquatic organisms destined for human consumption is a reason for concern. The optimal source of animal protein in commercial aquaculture feeds is fishmeal (FM). However it is becoming less available due to overfishing (Oliva-Teles et al., 2015). Alternative sources of protein for fish are necessary to decrease dependence on FM. In the past decades, researchers performed several study on FM replacement with vegetable ingredients such as soybean meal, soy protein concentrate, corn gluten, pea meal and wheat gluten. Nevertheless, even if vegetable protein are able to replace a substantial part of the FM (Oliva-Teles et al., 2015), these products show some limitations due to unbalanced amino acid (AA) profiles, high fibre content, antinutritional factors and competition with use for human consumption (Sørensen et al. 2011) and problems related to the inflammation of the digestive tract (Gai et al., 2012; Oliva-Teles et al., 2015; Jobling, 2016). In recent years, the value of insect protein as partial or complete replacements for FM has been studied (van Huis, 2013 Barroso et al., 2014; Makkar et al., 2014; Henry et al., 2015; Gasco et al., 2016; Cummins et al., 2017). One of the most investigated insect is black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens, HI) which meal seems to be a good example of replacement for fishmeal, due to its valuable nutritional properties . This study evaluated the effect of dietary inclusion of defatted HI meal on growth performances of gilthead seabream.