Enhancement of Live Food Nutritional Status with Essential Nutrients for Improving Aquatic Animal Health: A Review

SIMPLE SUMMARY: A highly nutritious quality diet that is readily accepted and digested is essential for better growth and development of aquaculture species. Most newly hatched fish and shrimp depend on live food as an important basic diet. Copepods are considered the nutritional benchmark diet for a wide range of marine fish larvae. However, Artemia and rotifers are often favored as starter feed, despite their inferior nutritional values in comparison to copepods. Therefore, Artemia, rotifers, and other live foods are commonly enriched with nutrients such as fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, and probiotics to imitate the copepod’s level of essential nutrients to improve rearing success for fish and crustacean larvae. ABSTRACT: At the present time, no artificial larval diet is capable of entirely fulfilling the dietary requirements of several larval fish and crustacean species. Zooplankton live food is the basic foundation of fish larviculture, and successful rearing of fish larvae still heavily depends on an adequate supply of nutritious live food. Despite being important, the production protocols of copepods and cladocerans (Moina) are still underdeveloped in hatcheries. Rotifers and Artemia are the most commonly used live foods. However, these live foods are evidently lacking in crucial nutrient constituents. Hence, through nutrient enrichment, live food with the nutritional profile that meets the requirements of fish larvae can be produced. With the aim to maximize the effectiveness of production to optimize profitability, it is important to evaluate and improve culture techniques for the delivery of micro- and macro-nutrients as feed supplements to larvae in aquaculture systems. Bioencapsulation and enrichment are the evolving techniques in aquaculture that are commonly employed to enhance the nutritional quality of live food by integrating nutrients into them, which subsequently improves the growth, survival, and disease resistance of the consuming hosts. This review aims to highlight some of the approaches and methods used to improve the nutritional quality of live food by modifying their nutrient composition, which could have immense promise in the enhancement of aquatic animal health.