An experiment was conducted to estimate optimal dietary arginine requirement in White Pekin ducks from one to 21 days of age, report C. Wang and colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing published in Poultry Science.

A total of 600 day-old male White Pekin ducks were randomly allotted to 10 dietary treatments with seven replicate pens of nine birds per pen. Birds in each group were fed maize-maize gluten meals diet containing 0.71, 0.84, 0.95, 1.03, 1.17, 1.27, 1.39, 1.47, 1.62 and 1.72 per cent arginine, respectively.

At 21 days of age, weight gain, feed intake, feed/gain ratio and breast meat yield from each treatment were measured.

Dietary supplementation of arginine significantly improved weight gain, feed intake, feed/gain and breast meat yield (P<0.01), according to Wang and co-authors.

Based on quadratic broken-line regression analysis, they found that the arginine requirement of male White Pekin ducks from one to 21 days of age was 0.95, 1.16 and 0.99 per cent for weight gain, feed/gain and breast meat yield, respectively.

Reference

^{Wang C., M. Xie, W. Huang, J.J. Xie, J. Tang and S.S. Hou. 2013. Arginine requirements of White Pekin ducks from 1 to 21 days of age. Poult. Sci. 92(4):1007-1010. doi: 10.3382/ps.2012-02596}

May 2013