In 2010 I began at the university of Nijmegen with the bachelor study Biology because of my love for nature and the functioning of biological systems. During this bachelor I realised that my interests especially lied in the aquatic environment and fish and decided to do the master 'Aquaculture and Marine resource managament' In Wageningen. The fact that aquaculture is still such a relatively young industry compared to terrestrial livestock and that there is still so much to investigate and apply in this industry is what really triggered me to pursue a career in the field of aquaculture and especially fish nutrition.

In the beginning of 2017 I started as the aquafeed nutritionist for Coppens International (now Alltech Coppens after the rebranding). This was a very nice position where I had the oppertunity to learn even more about fish nutrition and the actual application of research in the industry. In september 2018 I even got the oppertunity to start a PhD next to my job as a nutritionist looking at the use of net energy evaluation in salmonids.

My direct supervisor is dr. ir. Johan Schrama

Exploring the use of net energy evaluation for salmonids

Currently, feed evaluation for aquaculture in terms of performance is commonly based on digestible energy (DE) values and assumes a fixed utilisation of energy for growth. However, recent literature has made clear that not all forms of this digestible energy are utilised for growth with the same efficiency and is causing inaccuracies in the use of this DE approach. It therefore makes sense to move to a net energy (NE) approach, which is already commonly used in pig feed evaluation and takes into account differences in the forms of digestibly energy (either from protein, fat or carbohydrates).

This project will focus on exploring the potential use of the NE approach in feed evaluation for salmonids in aquaculture. Firstly by looking at the difference in predicting growth performance by DE or by a NE system as proposed by recent literature. Secondly by increasing the strength of such a model by looking more in to the carbohydrate fraction, especially the difference in nutritional value between starch and other non-starch polysaccharides. Finally, this project will examine potential factors influencing NE evaluation. Potential factors being the effect of species (rainbow trout vs Atlantic salmon) and life stage (parr versus smolt) in practical NE evaluation.