LAUSR

Mandarin fish is a typical carnivorous fish, it can accept artificial diet after domestication, which is significantly essential to optimize its artificial diet. Nevertheless, only few studies were conducted on artificial diet of mandarin fish. Therefore, an 8‐week feeding trial was conducted to evaluate the influence of feeding stimulants on growth performance, feed intake and appetite regulation of mandarin fish. In this trial, six diets were formulated, a basal diet contained 80% of Fish Meal without feeding stimulants, named as Control, 0.4% inosinic acid meal, 0.4% L‐Alanine meal, 3% Yeast meal, 3% a commercial squid extract meal and 0.4% betaine meal were added into the basal diet to make five experimental diets, which were named as IM, AM, YM, SVO and BM respectively. At the end of feeding trial, SVO group showed higher feed intake, up‐regulated mRNA expression of neuropeptide Y (NPY) and down‐regulated mRNA expression of pro‐opiomelanocorticoid (POMC) significantly as compared to control group, which suggested that squid extract improved feed acceptability and promoted appetite in mandarin fish. Similarly, compared to control group, SVO group showed low food conversion ratio, high weight gain and SGR, indicated that squid extract enhanced the growth performance. Our results suggested that the appropriate level of squid extract addition could contribute to optimize artificial diet in mandarin fish.