aquacultuR
A Comprehensive R Tool for Zootechnical Metrics
A collection of functions to compute frequently used metrics for
nutrition trials in aquaculture. Implementations include metrics
to calculate growth, feed conversion, nutrient use efficiency,
and feed digestibility. The package supports reproducible
workflows for summarising experimental results and reduces manual
calculation errors. For additional information see Machado e
Silva, Karthikeyan and Tellbüscher (2025)
aquacultuR 
aquacultuR is an R package providing functions for the calculation of growth and feed conversion metrics. The provided example datasets originate from studies in the field of aquaculture.
Notes
merge into cran, not into main!
Why using aquacultuR?
Until now, a comprehensive collection of equations that are commonly used in animal nutrition does not exist. This can make it difficult for people entering the field to understand how values were obtained. Also, the use of incorrect equations might not be recognized by reviewers in some cases. The advantages of wrapping those equations up in an R package in comparison to an Excel file are
- superior reproducibility
- reduced susceptibility to human errors
- having a citeable resource on hand that can be referred to
Installation
You can install aquacultuR from CRAN using:
install.packages("aquacultuR")
You can also install aquacultuR from GitHub if you prefer the latest development version by using:
require(devtools)
devtools::install_github("TellAnAx/aquacultuR")
In both cases, the package can eventually be loaded using:
library(aquacultuR)
Functionalities
| Function | Metric | Synonym |
|---|---|---|
gbw() |
Geometric bodyweight | |
mbw() |
Metabolic bodyweight | |
ag() |
Absolute growth (AG) | Weight gain |
agr() |
Absolute growth rate (AGR) | |
rgr() |
Relative growth rate (RGR) | |
sgr() |
Specific growth rate (SGR) | |
tgc() |
Thermal growth coefficient (TGC) | |
fr() |
Feeding rate (FR) | |
rfr() |
Relative feeding rate | Feeding rate |
nr() |
Nutrient retention | |
fcr() |
Feed conversion ratio (FCR) | |
fce() |
Feed conversion efficiency (FCE) | |
ner() |
Nutrient efficiency ratio (NER) | Protein/Energy/X efficiency ratio |
adc_dm() |
Apparent digestibility coefficient (ADC) | |
adc_nut() |
Apparent digestibility coefficient (ADC) | |
adc_ingr() |
Apparent digestibility coefficient (ADC) |
About
Authors:
- Anıl Axel Tellbüscher
- Davide Machado e Silva
- Simão Correia
Contributors:
- Madhav Karthikeyan
Logo design:
- Tomáš Pěnka