It’s commonly said in the aquaculture circles that if you start with cr@p, you end with cr@p. This is especially true when choosing your seed stock / fingerlings. You need to get good quality stock to get good grow out and good feed conversion, otherwise you’ll be losing valuable time and money.
In the shrimp sector, the larvae are put through challenge trials (they are exposed different salinity or exposed to formalin). If a certain threshold percentage survives, then they will be bought by the farmer.
This article details another means of objective measurement of seed stock quality by evaluating their morphometric ratios as it applies to seahorses – trunk width : trunk length.
| Aquaculture | |||||||||||||||||
| Volume 323, Number 1 (December 2011) | |||||||||||||||||
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Criteria for assessing juvenile quality of the lined seahorse, Hippocampus erectus | ||||||||||||||||
| Authors: | Dong Zhang, Fei Yin, Junda Lin | ||||||||||||||||
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| Source: | Aquaculture, Volume 323, Number 1 (December 2011) | ||||||||||||||||
| Page Numbers: | 255 – 258 | ||||||||||||||||
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| Abstract: | Juvenile quality has been demonstrated to be the key for commercial fish production. Variations in juvenile quality leading to varying growth and mortality are often encountered and well documented in many marine fish species. It is valuable to discover simple and reliable indicators for assessing juvenile quality in fish aquaculture. In this study, we established criteria for evaluating the juvenile quality of the lined seahorse, Hippocampus erectus, a Chinese traditional medicine and popular aquarium species. We raised 18 batches for 45days from birth to determine the potential criteria for assessing the juvenile quality of the line seahorse. There was a strong and significant correlation between survival through the fifth day and that on the day 45. By comparing the ratio of trunk width at 1/2 trunk length to trunk length (TW/TL) of dead and live juveniles during the first 5days, we found that TW/TL is a reliable indicator of the juvenile quality, with the distinct threshold of 0.190. | ||||||||||||||||
| Citation: | Dong Zhang, Fei Yin, Junda Lin . Criteria for assessing juvenile quality of the lined seahorse, Hippocampus erectus. Aquaculture, Volume 323, Number 1 (December 2011), pp. 255-258, | ||||||||||||||||
| URL: | http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=4DC59AE1453B881A037A | ||||||||||||||||
