Abstract
Cage aquaculture is in its infancy in Northeast India and there is need to popularize this technology to sustainably utilize large and variety of available resources in the form of reservoirs and floodplain wetlands. In our present study, we assessed the performance of common carp, Cyprinus carpio in cages in a mid-altitude reservoir namely Mapithel reservoir of Manipur. Cages (individual dimension 6x4x4 m) were stocked with fingerlings of common carp, Cyprinus carpio (av. length: 12.43±0.67 cm; av. weight: 35.65±4.51 g) at stocking densities of 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 fingerlings m-3 in triplicates. The reared fish were fed with floating pelleted feed at 3-5% of body weight for 5 months. The specific growth rates estimated at the different stocking densities were 1.08, 1.07, 1.00, 0.88 and 0.84, respectively. The gross fish yield increased up to a stocking density of 30 fingerlings m-3 beyond which there was no increase in fish yield. Therefore, for rearing C. carpio in net cages in Mapithel reservoir, the optimum stocking density was observed to be 30 fingerlings m-3.