Growth responses of animal and plant origin dietary lipids on the survival, growth and feed efficiency of Asian catfish, Clarias batrachus (Linnaeus, 1758) grow-out

Abstract

A 84-days long experiment was conducted with a view to observe the effects of different feeds on growth and survival of Clarias batrachus grow-out. There were seven treatments (FISOL, BETAL, SOYAL, LINOL, MIXOL, SATOL and NATFO) containing Fish oil, Beef tallow, Soybean oil, Linseed oil, Mixed oil (i.e. containing in 1:1:1:1 ratio of Fish oil, Beef tallow, Soybean oil, Linseed oil), Vegetable oil and minced chicken meat as natural food, respectively, each having three replications, stocked with 30 grow-out having an initial average weight 55.83 + 3.14 in a circular plastic pools (capacity 300 L). The six feeds were formulated with basic ingredients (Soybean meal, 35%; soluble starch, 29%; Casein, 19.5%; carboxy - methyl - cellulose, 2%; papain, 0.5%; vitamin and mineral mix, 4.0%) with iso-energetic (19.55 kJ/g, F1-F6 ) diets and results were compared with natural food fed fishes. Each diet was hand fed two times daily for 84-days to duplicate homogenous groups of 30 fish. The fishes fed with live chicken waste showed significantly poor results (p > 0.05) in terms of weight gain and Specific Growth Rate (SGR%) compared to the rest six treatments. The survival was recorded as 100% in all the treatments. Results showed that the growth performance significantly (p < 0.05) different with various lipid of animal and plant origin. At the end of the 84-days study the highest weight gain % was recorded in LINOL (F4) as 105.1%. For other treatment weight gain was recorded as 40.3%, 75.4%, 25.6%, 60.2%, 37.0%, and 44.1%for FISOL, BETAL, SOYAL, MIXOL, SATOL and NATFO respectively. The feed efficiency in terms of Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR) recorded as 2.46 to 3.22 among all the feeding trials. It could be concluded, based on the results of this trial, that a diet formulated with a gross energy of 19.55kJ/g is sufficient to promote better feed efficiency and growth performance in C. batrachus grow-out however, the best growth was recorded in linseed oil (LINOL) followed by BETAL and MIXOL.