Observations on the food and feeding habits of the Indian oil sardine, Sardinella longiceps Val.

Abstract

A study of the food and feeding habits of fishes forms an important aspect of fishery biological investigations. Some work has been done in the past on the food and feeding habits of oil sardine, Sardinella longiceps Val. Hornell (1910) first published an account of the food of oil sardine and also emphasised the importance of undertaking the study in greater detail. Hornell and Nayudu (1924) gave a brief account on the food of oil sardine along with a note on the plankton off West-Hill, Calicut. Subsequent studies on the food and feeding habits of this fish have been made by Chidambaram (1950) and Nair (1953) and brief references by John and Menon (1942), Nair and Subrahmanyan (1955) and Subrahmanyan (1959). Thus, some amount of reliable information is already available on the food and feeding habits of the oil sardine. The results published so far do not, however, include any observations north of Calicut, which is a fishing centre on the Malabar coast- The present account deals with some preliminary quantitative and qualitative observations made on the food of Sardinella longiceps Val., at Mangalore, an important fishing centre representative of the Mysore coast during the period February 1957 to January 1960.