Evaluation of Full fat & Defatted Maggot Meal

High cost of fishmeal has led to the need to research for alternative low cost feed ingredients. Differently processed maggot meals were assessed and fed to C. gariepinus fingerlings. Five isonitrogenous and isocaloric diets were formulated to provide 40% crude protein. Fishmeal in the diets were totally replaced with either oven-dried full-fat, oven-dried defatted (Diets II & IV) or sundried full-fat, sundried defatted (Diets III & V) maggot meals respectively. Diet I without maggot meal served as the control. An experiment was conducted to determine the nutrient density (proximate composition, gross energy and mineral constituent) of processed maggot meals (hydrolyzed, unhydrolyzed, defatted, full-fat, sundried and oven-dried).The experiment also assessed the effect of processed maggot meals as replacement for fish meal in practical diets for C. gariepinus. The results obtained from the experiments indicated that: high levels of nutrients exist in the processed maggot meals andthe occurrence of the nutrients was higher in defatted-oven-dried samples. It is recommended that farmers should utilize maggot meal in place of fishmeal which is presently in use and highly expensive.