Effects of graded levels of Fusarium-toxin-contaminated wheat in Pekin duck diets on performance, health and metabolism of deoxynivalenol and zearalenone

Abstract

1. Diets with increasing proportions of Fusarium-toxin-contaminated wheat were fed to Pekin ducks for 49 d in order to titrate the lowest effect level. Dietary deoxynivalenol (DON) and zearalenone (ZON) concentrations were successively increased up to 6 to 7 mg/kg and 0·05 to 0·06 mg/kg, respectively.

2. Feed intake, live weight gain and feed to gain ratio were not influenced by dietary treatment.

3. Gross macroscopic inspection of the upper digestive tract did not reveal any signs of irritation, inflammation or other pathological changes. The weight of the bursa of Fabricius, relative to live weight, decreased in a dose-related fashion. Activities of glutamate dehydrogenase and γ-glutamyl-transferase in serum were either unaffected or inconsistently affected by dietary treatments.

4. Concentrations of DON and of its de-epoxydised metabolite in plasma and bile were lower than the detection limits of 6 and 16 ng/ml, respectively, of the applied high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method.

5. ZON or its metabolites were not detectable in plasma and livers (detection limits of the HPLC method were 1, 0·5 and 5 ng/g for ZON, α-zearalenol (α-ZOL) and β-zearalenol (β-ZOL), respectively). Concentrations of ZON, α-ZOL and β-ZOL in bile increased linearly with dietary ZON concentration. The mean proportions of ZON, α-ZOL and β-ZOL of the sum of all three metabolites were 80, 16 and 4%, respectively.

6. Taken together, it can be concluded that dietary DON and ZON concentrations up to 6 and 0·06 mg/kg, respectively, did not adversely affect performance and health of growing Pekin ducks.

Acknowledgements

The assistance of colleagues at the Institute for Animal Welfare and Animal Husbandry, located in Celle, and at the Institute of Animal Nutrition of the Federal German Agricultural Research Centre in Braunschweig in performing the experiments and analyses is gratefully acknowledged.