66 SEPTEMBER 2019 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WAS.ORG Because little is known about the blood physiology of red tilapia cultured in seawater (Hrubec et al. 2000), reference intervals for high-density production of red tilapia do not seem applicable to fish raised under different environmental and management conditions such as biofloc. Environmental disturbance such as poor water Intensive aquaculture requires maintenance of suitable environmental conditions for the growth of organisms. That is why, in recent years, aquaculture has promoted the development of a comprehensive knowledge of the health of organisms in culture and the development of mechanisms to monitor and/or prevent nutritional deficiencies or the development of diseases. One way to know the health condition of cultured organisms is through application of hematological tools. Blood is a body fluid that circulates through the veins and arteries of all vertebrates, is responsible for transporting oxygen, providing nutrients to cells, transporting metabolic waste products and hormones and defending the body through specialized cells (Clauss et al. 2008). Because any change in blood criteria is part of preliminary responses to stress, hematology may anticipate clinical manifestations of diseases and nutritional and health deficiencies of organisms (Bahmani et al. 2001, Grant 2015, Hasan et al. 2016). A large number of hematological variables can be analyzed but some are key for presumptive diagnosis of organism health. The most common are red blood cell indices that are valuable in the morphological classification of anemias: mean corpuscular volume (fL), mean concentration of hemoglobin (pg) and mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration (percent). Those indices are calculated with other primary indices such as the total erythrocyte count (×106 cell/µL), hemoglobin concentration (g/dL) and packed cell volume (percent) (Grant 2015). Additionally, concentrations of glucose (mg/ dL), total protein (g/dL) and albumin (g/dL) are useful tools to evaluate stress and the nutritional condition of fish (Mazaferro et al. 2002, Martínez-Porchas et al. 2009, Yousefi et al. 2016). Red tilapia Oreochromis spp. (Fig. 1) is known for its general tolerance to a wide range of environmental conditions, especially salinity, and its cultivation in seawater with biofloc is a potential production alternative (Abdul et al. 2012, Miranda-Baeza et al. 2017). Blood Physiology of Red Tilapia Cultured in Seawater with Biofloc and Probiotics I. Bañuelos-Vargas, O.A. Mendoza-Gamboa, G.A. Rodríguez-Montes de Oca, E. Martínez-Montaño and J.C. Román-Reyes FIGURE 1. Red tilapia Oreochromis spp. Photo: Isaura Bañuelos-Vargas, FACIMAR, UAS FIGURE 2. Tanks used for the study. Photo: Isaura Bañuelos-Vargas, FACIMAR, UAS. FIGURE 3. Blood sampling from one of the treatment tanks. Photo: Isaura Bañuelos-Vargas, FACIMAR, UAS.
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