Relationships between spawn quality and biochemical composition of eggs and hatchlings of Octopus vulgaris under different parental diets

On the other side, the utilization of nutrients during the embryo development can also be seen as an indicator of the nutritional requirements during the early stages of development and be useful for a future advance in the formulation of paralarvae artificial diets. Our results pointed to an embryo catabolism mainly based on proteins, as previously suggested (Lee, 1994; Villanueva and Norman, 2008). Data also suggest that triacylglycerol, sterol ester and phosphatidylcholine were specifically catabolized for energy and/or used to de novo synthesize lipid classes such as PS or PE. Within fatty acids, we found that arachidonic acid was strongly reduced (50-51%) during embryonic development. Further studies on the particular role of AA and the n-3 HUFA (mainly EPA and DHA) for early stages of O. vulgaris are needed, specially taking into account that these FAs are essential for this species (Monroig et al., 2012a,b).