The Anesthetic Efficiency of Clove Oil in Caspian Salmon, Salmo trutta caspius K., Smolts in Dosage-Salinity-pH Linked Approach

Abstract

Anesthetics are used in fish culture facilities by biologists and aquaculturists to facilitate various handling procedures, such as weighing, sorting, collection of gametes, tagging, as well as veterinary procedures (Summerfelt and Smith 1990; Kazu and Siwicki 2001). Regardless of the agent, the process of anesthesia in all fish develops in a similar way and runs in a progressive pattern (McFarland 1959), resulting in loss of consciousness, inhibition of reflex activity, and reduced skeletal muscle tone (McFarland 1960; Isaacs 1983). The properties addressed for choosing efficient anesthetic agent for fish will vary with the objectives and species, but in general, fast induction (within 3 min), fast recovery (within 15 min), and no subjected mortality are among the most prevalent criteria considered in safe anesthesia (Woody et al. 2002). The most, widely used fish anesthetics include tricaine methane sulfonate, benzocaine, etomidate, metomidate, 2phenoxy ethanol, quinaldine, and quinaldine sulfate. Clove oil has recently been pointed out as a potential fish anesthetic (Isaacs 1983). Clove oil is distillated from the stem, leaves, and buds of the clove tree, Eugenia aromatica (Soto and Burhanuddin 1995), and it has been demonstrated as an effective anesthetic agent on several non-salmonid fish (Soto and Burhanuddin 1995; Munday and Wilson 1997; Peake 1998; Walsh and Pease 2002; Hajek et al. 2006). Attempts have been made to study practical clove oil anesthesia on salmonids by various researchers. Iversen et al. (2003) evaluated