Addition of lemuru fish oil in feed on the gonadal maturity level of female silver barb, Rasbora argyrotaenia

Abstract

The development of aquaculture technology to produce silver barb is constrained by the low fecundity and long space of reproduction periodicity. As a consequence, feed manipulation is necessary to improve fecundity and gonadal maturity. Fecundity and gonadal maturity could be developed through additional fat from lemuru fish oil. Lemuru fish oil contains high Omega-3 that frequently used in the vitellogenesis process. The objectives of this study were adding lemuru fish oil in feed to increase the gonadal maturity level of the female silver barb. This research applied a completely randomized design (CRD) method which consist of five treatments (0%,2%,4%,6%,8%) in adding the different concentration of lemuru fish oil in feed and four replications for each. The feeding was done three times a day, at 4% biomass in 42 days of treatment. The parameters observed in this study were the gonadal maturity level in morphology as well as histology, gonad somatic index (GSI), gonad index (GI) of the female silver barb. The results of this study indicated that the addition of lemuru fish oil at 4% concentration in feed was able to accelerate 60% of the population of female silver barb gonadal maturity in the level of III and IV.