Effect of Feeding Frequency and Water Quality on Growth and Production of Tilapia Fish

Abstract

Tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) is one of the most vital fish commercially used nowadays all around the globe. The growth rate of Tilapia increases with an increase in feeding frequency relative to different water quality parameters, having some limitation on feeding frequency as well as feed rate. In the present study, three experiments were conducted in nine cement concrete tanks supplemented with aeration, each experiment was carried out to monitor the growth parameters of tilapia i.e., body weight, length, and girth of cultured fish based on different feeding regimes on a weekly basis. In all experiments, a mixture of boiled rice and mustard oil cake was used as a feed at 3% of fish body weight. A bioenergetics model which signify the variation in growth parameters has derived incorporating various water quality parameters such as ammonia (0.01-0.04mg/L), temperature (23.8-28.1 ◦C), pH (6.12-8.31), dissolved oxygen (6.10-8.61 mg/L or 87.1-101 %), nitrite (0.02-0.05 mg/L) using Hydrolab MS-5.The provided feeding rate per day was once, twice, and thrice in a day with respect to their experimental setups marked as 1,2, and 3. It was observed that tilapia fish grows more rapidly when fish were fed thrice in a day but the maximum percentage of uneaten food was found to be in experiment three compared to others. Whereas, in experiment two the survival percentage was found to be more (71.2%) without wasting any uneaten feed. In addition, the result showed that the feed intake capacity gets reduced as the fish attains maturity.