Abstract
Sperata seenghala is one of the largest freshwater catfish of Indian sub-continent. This fish has good market demand as food fish due to its good taste with high nutritional value and for this reason it constitutes an important capture fishery of all the major rivers and reservoirs of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Earlier number of works has been carried out on its food and feeding habit, reproductive biology, morphology, fishery, captive culture etc, but no such consolidated review report is available. With this view the current review work has been carried out to sum up all available information along with gathering up the lacunae of information which will be helpful for future fishery and management of this fish species. It has been documented that comprehensive information is available on its food and feeding habit but further investigations are needed to put firm conclusion on some aspects of its reproductive biology and to gather proper knowledge on its captive culture technique.
Highlights
Sperata seenghala (Sykes, 1839) is one of the largest freshwater catfish; widely distributed in rivers, reservoirs, lakes, floodplains, inundated swamp fields, ditches, canals and other freshwater areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Myanmar and Nepal [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10], its availability in China waters has been reported by Jayaram [3]
Food and feeding habit of Sperata seenghala has so far been studied by number of workers but except Sarkar [25], none of them have studied it in more details
Maximum of the workers have concluded on food and feeding habit of this fish species just by analysing the gut content of their collected specimens which is a basic technique to ascertain on food and feeding habit of any fish species
Summary
Sperata seenghala (Sykes, 1839) is one of the largest freshwater catfish; widely distributed in rivers, reservoirs, lakes, floodplains, inundated swamp fields, ditches, canals and other freshwater areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Myanmar and Nepal [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10], its availability in China waters has been reported by Jayaram [3]. Its adults and juveniles are bottom and marginal dwellers; fry are used to inhabit the shallow marginal area of river and marginal pits connecting the river; larvae live in the nests formed among rocks and soft muddy beds of rivers [8] It has been considered as one of the most admired edible fishes due to its good taste and low number of intramuscular bones [10,12,13], it has high nutritional value with good protein content [14,15,16]; each gram of its flesh contains 200 unit of vitamin A [17]. Jayaram [3], Talwar and Jhingran [6] and Tripathi [7] all have reported Sperata seenghala with maximum length of 150 cm in their collected specimens
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