Vermiculture in Egypt: - FAO - Regional Office for the Near East and

earthworms, delivering a protein punch of 5.9 million tons. The recipe is
uncomplicated: find crap, add worms, wait, then harvest, dry and grind.
The rock-solid implications of earthworms for aquaculture have already been verified.
Two species of worms were fed to a group of trout, a classic intensive aquaculture
species, while another group was fed commercial trout pellets made from fishmeal.
The results were splendid: the earthworm-fed fish grew as well or better than their
fishmeal-fed counterparts. Another study indicated the effectiveness of earthworm
feed on tilapia aquaculture, finding that tilapia actually grew better with earthworm
supplements than with fishmeal.
Using earthworms as fish feed presents a truly novel method for reducing the impact
of aquaculture on marine ecosystems. The benefits are threefold. Earthworms eat
polluting manure, improving water quality of coastal fisheries and aiding in recovery
from over-fishing. Eliminating fishmeal from aquaculture diets will also significantly
reduce overall stress on wild fisheries as well as allow for production cost control
independent of the price of wild fish. Thirdly, and not insignificantly, earthworms can
be used in place of fishmeal to feed land animals such as cows, pigs and chickens. At
present, land animal consumption accounts for a great deal of fishmeal intake, and
transitioning livestock to an earthworm diet will take huge pressure off wild fisheries.
Earthworms are a triple-win solution to intensive aquacultures‟ appetite for fishmeal.
The worms are by no means a silver bullet as they cannot solve all of aquaculture‟s
problems immediately. Pollution from intensive crustacean aquaculture will remain a
serious threat to coastal habitats until the lagoons are either moved inland or farmed
less intensively. This is to say nothing of mollusk aquaculture, a genuine champion of
sustainable protein production.
Earthworms, with an important high protein component, are used to feed chickens,
pigs, rabbits, and as a dietary supplement for ornamental fish or other fish species
difficult to raise and Some authors claim that in breeding of aquarium fish it is
essential to use a variety of food.
Vermicompost produced in ecological boxes can be used for feeding plants and the
created biomass can be a highly nutritious food for animals, because it consists of 58–
71% protein, 2.3–9.0% fat depending on earthworm species and the way earthworms
are fed with organic waste.
6.3. Earthworms, the sustainable aquaculture feed of the future
Aquaculture is a booming global industry: from 2002 to 2006, world aquaculture
production increased from 40.4 million metric tons to 51.7 million metric tons. Over a
three-decade span from 1975 to 2005, aquaculture production grew tenfold. During
this same span of time, however, wild capture fell from 93.2 to 92.0 million metric
tons. The inherent exhaustibility of the oceans necessitates that economically efficient
and environmentally responsible aquaculture fill the gap between supply and demand
for finfish and shellfish worldwide.
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