Abstract
Recently, the cocoon production is reducing very steeply in Japan. The main reason for this cocoon reduction is due to high labor cost and the production expense is apt to rise year by year. Accordingly, the improvement of cocoon productivity by retrenchment of the production expense is intensively required in my country. Therefore, the silkworm rearing on the artificial diet is largely expected as the innovation techniques of sericulture. Since rearing of the silkworm on artificial diets has first been achieved in 1960, and the silkworm larvae were reared throughout all the instars on artificial diets(Fukuda et al., 1960, Ito & Tanaka, 1960). The artificial diets used at this time contained 50% or more of dried, pulverized mulberyy leaves as one of the main ingredients, and the composition was rather simple. When reared on these diets, larval growth and development were retarded, small cocoons appeared, and the adults laid only a small number of eggs. At first, we would like to study about nutritional requirement of the silkworm, using the chemically defined diet which prepared artificially. Subsequently, attempts were made to improve the diets by replacement of crude ingredients with possibly purer compounds, as mentioned later. Before giving the details on individual nutrient, I would like to summarize about the outline of utilization flow of various nutrients through the larval-pupal development and these daily quantitative requirements per body weight in the silkworm when they were reared on mulberry leaves.