The contribution of terrestrial plantmaterial to the diet of A. japonicus
has also been reported by Seo et al. (2011) andWang et al. (2010). Onthe
other hand, fishmeal appeared to play a lesser role in the sea cucumber
nutrition, though there were large fluxes of waste feed that contains
fishmeal in the study area (Yokoyama et al., 2009). A. japonicus has proteases
in its digestive tract (Fu et al., 2005), however, the present study
suggests a shortage in capability of the sea cucumber to digest animal
protein.