Aquatic Animal Nutrition: Plant Preparations—‘Ever Tried. Ever Failed. Try Again.’

Aquaculture and aquaculture research must serve at least two primary purposes: the safe production of healthy food for human consumption and the advancement of biological knowledge of farmed aquatic animals. On the one hand, pragmatic approaches are justified, even mandatory, to achieve the first purpose. On the other hand, aquaculture as a biological science has not yet developed robust paradigms, i.e., it has not yet become a mature science in the Kuhnian sense. This introductory chapter attempts to identify scientific gaps in current aquaculture research that can be filled in the short term from a basic biology perspective. It discusses the low-dose range of even so-called antinutritional factors and introduces the terms ‘hormesis.’ Epigenetic age is introduced as an indicator of the well-being of aquatic animals and is placed in a broader epigenetic framework that could be useful for aquaculture research. Nutritional epigenetics has highlighted the importance of diet for health management. The same applies to the gut microbiota which can be optimized or even engineered in order to better tolerate and use newly designed aquafeed. The same is true for the gut microbiota, which can be optimized or even engineered to help the host better tolerate and utilize newly developed aquafeeds. Finally, the application of artificial intelligence to the design of optimized aquafeeds is discussed. The general conclusions for each chapter of this volume are very similar and are therefore presented here in the introductory chapter. In order to avoid unnecessary repetition, only specific conclusions are included in the chapters where appropriate.