Sustainable salmon feed is of crucial importance for the future of the Norwegian salmon farming industry. Today, feed accounts for more than three quarters of the climate footprint that a Norwegian salmon causes on its way to a dinner plate in Europe. Approximately 92 percent of the raw materials used in Norwegian farmed feed are currently imported. The current government has therefore set a goal of increasing the proportion of feed based on Norwegian resources and using only sustainable ingredients by 2030. The report "Råvareløftet" proposes exploring a number of potential new feed raw materials, including shellfish and tunicates.
Shellfish such as mussels are a valuable source of marine fatty acids and proteins that are important in fish nutrition. Mussels feed on algae in the marine environment by filtering large amounts of seawater. Mussels can therefore take up algal toxins such as okadaic acid and dinophysistoxins (causing diarrhetic shellfish poisoning (DSP)) as well as saxitoxins and gonya toxins (causing paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP)). Algae toxins are generally relatively stable molecules that can be concentrated in shellfish and other filter-feeding animals. Therefore, they can occur in products made from them, e.g. fish feed ingredients.
The main hypothesis of the project is that the toxic equivalence approach used in the risk assessment of OA/DTX and STX toxins for humans can also be used to evaluate the risk to fish health and the potential for transfer to fish products. Using this approach will provide the data required to perform the necessary risk assessments of algal toxins in novel marine feed sources for salmon.
Partners
- Nofima
- National Research Council in Canada
