Effects of carbohydrate addition methods on Pacific white shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei)

Abstract The addition of external carbohydrate in Pacific white shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) culture has shown positive effects on water quality and shrimp performance. However, this practice requires additional skills and labor, and therefore may not be widely adopted. This research investigated the potential to combine the carbon source and the feed in one pellet in shrimp culture. The carbon source used in this experiment was corn starch. The experiment was executed in 6 indoors mesocosms tanks, with full control of the water source, temperature, and light intensity and duration. The three treatments including COM-Feed (commercial feed), COM-Feed + CHO (commercial feed with separate corn starch addition), and CHO-Feed (pelleted diet made by incorporating additional corn starch into the commercial feed) were randomly assigned to the mesocosms tanks, and run two times consecutively. Adding corn starch separately resulted in higher shrimp biomass gain and protein efficiency ratio (P