Nutritive value of three organisms from mangrove ecosystem: Ucides cordatus (Linnaeus, 1763), Mytella sp. (Soot-Ryen, 1955) and Crassostrea rhizophorae (Guilding, 1828)

Abstract

Mangrove ecosystems have always provided abundant food to man, constituting an important source of income for mangrove populations. In fact, a great part of protein consumed comes from the mangrove ecosystem where these populations practice self-subsistence extractivism (Schaeffer-Novelli, 2003). Analytic studies of nutrients in Brazilian food were basically carried out from the 1940s and 1950s to early 1960s. Recently, however, due to the rise of new scientific concepts in nutrition and food science, the interest has been renewed (Lajolo, 1995 apud. Torres et al., 2000). Thus, the objective of this work is to assess the nutritional value of three mangrove animals: the crab Ucides cordatus, the oyster Crassostrea rhizophorae, and the mussel Mytella sp., by analysis of proximate composition, mineral content and caloric values of their edible parts. [...]