Improve Animal Performance on Shrimp Farms with Zinpro® 

Shrimp can achieve new levels of performance and health when producers implement a proven, high-quality nutrition strategy. Providing quality nutrients, including essential trace minerals, through every production phase can improve your animal and operational performance. Helping shrimp producers implement proven mineral nutrition during each phase of development will equip shrimp to perform to their full potential – further optimizing productivity and sustainability within your customers’ aquaculture system. 

Equip Shrimp to Overcome Environmental Stressors 

Shrimp encounter multiple challenges in commercial production throughout the broodstock, hatchery, and grow-out phases. When shrimp diets are lacking essential nutrients, like zinc, the shrimp immune system becomes more susceptible to environmental stressors and operational output can decrease. Shrimp that are not supplemented with organic trace minerals, including zinc, are more sensitive to these three detrimental environmental stressors: 

• Health and disease: Bacterial and viral pathogens spread easily through aquatic systems. These obstacles hurt shrimp health and depress growth, creating risk for high mortality. 
• Water quality: Slight changes in temperature, pH, salinity and dissolved oxygen can fluctuate throughout production cycle. These changes may negatively impact shrimp productivity by slowing growth and reducing resistance to disease. 
• Stocking density: Higher stocking density increases the intensity of your system and places more stress on shrimp. This escalates competition, resulting in shrimp that may succumb to health problems more easily, and finish with less desirable biomass at harvest. 

Despite these hurdles within a shrimp farming system, implementing a proven nutrition plan with essential nutrients like zinc, can boost the shrimp immune systems’ ability to deal with environmental stressors. 

Improve Shrimp Immunity and Maximize Production Output with Zinpro® Availa® Zn 

Shrimp health is critical to a farm’s profitability. You can trust that your customers’ shrimp are set up for optimal health and performance when fed proven animal nutrition with unrivalled mineral absorption from Zinpro®.  Shrimp that are fed Zinpro zinc will build a stronger immune function, helping them achieve better feed conversion – resulting in more marketable biomass while using less feed. Healthier shrimp also experience decreased mortality, ensuring producers have larger and more marketable shrimp. 

With these insights in hand, we found that supplementing  80 ppm of zinc from Zinpro® Availa® Zn through the grow-out phase significantly boosts the shrimp immune system. Again, this ensures animals are healthy and can achieve the improved performance that you desire. Feeding our highly bioavailable zinc mineral source at 80 ppm maintained shrimp performance measures of weight gain and feed conversion, while improving immune-related enzyme activity and antioxidant capacity. Additionally, our research showed these results from providing 80 ppm zinc from Zinpro Availa Zn: 

• 12.5% economic advantage (ROI)  
• 16.4% increase in zinc concentration of hepatopancreas, indicating improved zinc absorption and storage 
• 32.4% increase in hepatopancreas antioxidant enzyme activity  
• 95% increase in hepatopancreas lysozyme activity, giving shrimp a better fighting chance against bacteria  

This information is an extension of our previous blog, where my teammate Dr. Claudia Silva shared the positive impact 60 ppm zinc from Zinpro® Availa® Zn had on shrimp performance. Read her Your Zinc Choice May Be Limiting Shrimp Performance blog here.  

In addition to feeding Zinpro® Performance Minerals®, encouraging to producers manage environmental stressors will prime their shrimp farms for optimal performance. Key focus areas should be improving water quality through regular testing, biosecurity measures to alleviate disease and managing stocking density by providing adequate trace minerals to mitigate the pitfalls of intense competition.  

Transform Shrimp Health and Productivity with Zinpro Experts

Zinpro is here to help you transform the productivity of shrimp. You can help your customers maximize their shrimp farming system by providing proven animal nutrition with unrivaled mineral absorption to keep shrimp healthy and able to produce more marketable biomass. 

Visit our aquaculture species page to learn more and contact a Zinpro aqua specialist to discuss the right management solutions to help your aquaculture customers perform at their best. 

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