THE EFFECT OF BETA-CAROTENE IN ARTIFICIAL DIETS ON PRODUCTION AND QUALITY OF THE GONADS IN THE ADULT SEA URCHIN HELIOCIDARIS ERYTHROGRAMMA

摘要

The gonads of sea urchins are regarded a delicacy by many cultures. Gonad sensory attributes are very important in establishing price and marketability of the product. When sea urchins are harvested from the wild, the gonads are noticeably inconsistent in these qualities. Feeding sea urchins with specially designed artificial diets over a maintenance period may improve these characteristics. Preliminary experiments in our laboratory demonstrated a potential of single cell protein (yeast) to promote high gonad yield and gonad production efficiency (Senaratna et al., in press). This study was designed to examine the effect of P-carotene addition to yeast based diet on the production and sensory characteristics of sea urchin gonads.