Exogenous Probiotics on Biofloc based Aquaculture: A Review

Abstract

The successful entrepreneurship of aqua farming relies on the production of aquatic animals in the cost effective, social and environmental friendly approach. Nevertheless, presently fish farming is suffering from various problems related to these. Biofloc technology and/or application of probiotics provide promising results to aquaculture in terms of improvement in the growth and survival of aquatic animals, along with other benefits such as maintaining water quality without causing pollution to the environment. Biofloc is mainly comprised of various beneficial microbial communities, but the action of some probiotics it contains is unknown. On the other hand, probiotics are single, known live microbial strains and their actions to the animals are well established. Therefore, probiotics are recognized for having the most important constituents in the aquaculture. Although biofloc method and probiotics applications are promised to have positive roles aforementioned, the fish welfare often disturbed as the survival of the animals are always less in the fish farming. These led researchers to try generate a new technique to minimize these concerns. Recently new strategy of integrating both biofloc and probiotics were introduced called the exogenous addition of known probiotic bacteria to the biofloc. The study was demonstrated in the area by keeping biofloc as a control. Results promised that addition of single or combination of known probiotics to the biofloc further improve the growth performance of animals in addition with the maintenance of water quality parameters. Besides they also were promising the highest survival to animals with the reduction of pathogenic microbes. An exogenous root of probiotic bacteria on biofloc based aquaculture is a novel approach; relatively less number of studies has been performed in the area. This review describes the impacts of exogenous probiotics on biofloc based fish culture systems.