Abstract

Catfish offal flour (COF; Pangaius hypopthalmus) has the potential to replace fish meal (FM) due to its high crude protein content. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of substituting FM with COF in basal diets on food intake (FI), body weight gain (BWG), and feed conversion ratio (FCR) in quails. A total of 100 male quails were randomly assigned to five treatment groups, each with four replicates. The treatment groups were fed with basal diet + 0 COF and 100 FM (T0), basal diet + 25 COF and 75 FM (T1), basal diet + 50 COF and 50 FM (T2), basal diet + 75 COF and 25 FM (T3), and basal diet + 100 COF and 0 FM (T4). Feed intake, BWG, and FCR were measured from 0 to 35 days of age. The findings indicated that substituting FM with COF up to 100 did not significantly affect FI, BWG, and FCR. It can be concluded that COF has the potential to replace FM in basal diets while maintaining performance in quails. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. © The Author(s) 2024