Snakeheads in India
The air-breathing snakehead fish (Channa striata) commonly called stripped murrel in India, is one of the most popular freshwater fishes. Live snakehead fish fetches a stable high price between INR 400-500/kg (US $6-8/kg) in different retail markets. Murrel was officially declared as the “state fish” for Telangana in 2016, which focused upon the promotion of murrel farming and conserving the indigenous aquatic diversity in the water bodies of Telangana.
Considering the need to bring more high value species into aquaculture in India, Uno Feeds, one of India’s largest extruded fish feed manufacturers, has entered into a strategic co-operation with Nutriera Group, the biggest integrated aquafeed technology solution provider, to bring the technology for domestication and grow out of snakehead fish in India. Since 2015, Uno Feeds has set up a dedicated hatchery and research facility for breeding snakehead in Bhimavaram, Andhra Pradesh with the assistance of the Nutriera team.
From 2016 to 2019, the commercial scale artificial breeding of snakehead fish was successfully carried out at this facility and the fry was gradually weaned to take specially formulated extruded snakehead feed. The grow-out phase of these weaned seeds was also carried out in several farming areas in West Godavari, East Godavari and Krishna District, widely spread over 100 acres with a 100 percent planned increase in farmed area annually. Throughout the past five years, snakehead fish intensive farming at Uno Feeds has also encountered some farm-end difficulties, such as limited fresh water resources, microcystis bloom, extreme high temperature and severe fish diseases like water moulds and Epizootic Ulcerative Syndrome outbreak during the winter season.
Snakehead fish is a typical carnivorous fish with high level feed nutrition requirements. As the result of the unavailability of the natural water resources for water exchange, the continuous feeding and fish feces bring about worsening water quality, and then microcystis proliferation occurs during farming under the conditions of higher temperature. Fish liver was also noted to be especially vulnerable after encountering with microcystin breakout, which became yellowed and fragile.
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The Aquaculturists
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