It has been well established that animal protein performs better than plant protein in the growth and nutritive value of cultivable fish. By far the most suitable animal protein for incorporation into fish diets is fish meal. Fish meal is almost always made from marine fish, and can be based on the by-catches or a product of a specific fishery (De Silva and Anderson, 1995). Squilla species, a marine stomatopod generally called as mantis shrimp, is found in abundance along the Indian coast. The fine powder obtained from grinding the whole body of sun dried squilla species is known as squillameal, which has an excellent nutritive value. Taking this into consideration, it has been proposed to evaluate the suitability of incorporation of squilla meal as animal protein, in the traditional feed (rice bran and groundnut oil cake mixture) of Labeo rohita. For this purpose experiments have been conducted on the fingerlings (of an average weight of 5.33±0.13g) of L. rohita, for 90 days in the laboratory with 35% protein level traditional feed as control diet and 35%and 40% protein level feeds, formulated with squilla meal, as test diets. All the ingredients of these diets have been sieved, steam cooked after through mixing with water, pelletized with the help of a pellet mill and then dried in a hot air oven with blower at about 50o C. The dry pellets of these diets have been used to feed the experimental fingerlings of L. rohita to study the Absolute growth, Specific growth rate (S.G.R), Food conversion ratio (F.C.R), Protein efficiency ratio (P.E.R), and Apparent protein digestibility (A.P.D). The observations revealed that the performance of both the test diets formulated with squilla meal, is far superior to that of the control diet. However, from among the two formulated diets, the one with 35% of animal protein performed better in every respect. Proximate analyses of all the three diets and fish flesh have been carried out to evaluate the relative performance of the two animal protein incorporated artificial diets. The details are dealt in the present paper.
Nutritional requirements of the puffer fish: Purified test diet and the optimum protein level.