Plastic responses by wild brown trout (Salmo trutta) to plant-based diets

Decreasing fishmeal availability and increasing prices promote the usage of plant-derived feedstuff as a substitution for fishmeal in commercial salmonid diets. However, little is known about the impact of plant-derived feedstuff on juvenile brown trout (Salmo trutta), a species that exhibits strong phenotypic plasticity with various genetic sub-structures and high overall genetic diversity. Thus, the production of brown trout for restocking purposes preferentially uses wild fish as broodstock to avoid loss of genetic variability. Because of nutritional programming, the strictly carnivorous feeding habit of wild brown trout broodfish could nevertheless have a negative impact on the digestive physiology of fry and fingerlings that are fed with commercial plant-protein containing trout diets. The present study, therefore, investigated whether the feeding of plant-based diets from first feeding onwards induced a permanent improvement in the utilisation of plant-derived protein sources in wild brown trout juveniles. Any plastic responses to the experimental diets resulting in a long-term physiological effect were hypothesised to be not only observed in growth performance, but also in altered pepsin and amylase activities. We demonstrated that (i) the feeding of wild brown trout fry with inclusion levels of up to 50% of dietary plant proteins is beneficial during the first weeks of life and (ii) continuous feeding of at least 50% plant-derived dietary protein resulted in the same rate of growth when compared to the growth resulting from fishmeal as the exclusive dietary protein source. Pepsin and amylase activities were only partly affected by diet-type and it can be concluded that intestinal pepsin and amylase activities in juvenile brown trout are primarily regulated by intrinsic mechanisms. In the present experiment, we were not able to induce a permanent nutritional programming effect of the first feeding diet; instead, a cross-over diet change applied 89 days post first feeding demonstrated that wild brown trout fry exhibit highly plastic responses to different feeding strategies during the first months of life.