GROWTH PERFORMANCES OF MUD CRAB Scylla olivacea FED ARTIFICIAL DIET AT DIFFERENT FREQUENCIES DURING NURSERY
Aneffort to reduce cannibalism and to stimulate the growth of mud crab crablet is providing adequate feed that meet the requirement level of the crablet. The objecive of this study was to evaluate the growth and survival rate of crablet fed artificial diet with different feeding frequencies during the nursery.
The treatments were different feeding frequenci esnamely (A) 2 times (08:00 and 18:00), (B) 3 times (08:00, 13:00, and 18:00 ) and (C) 4 times (08:00, 13:00, 18:00 and 23:00). Feeding rate was from 30 to 15 % of biomas/day. Feed used in the feeding trial was a dry pellet (1.2 mm) containing 46.5 % crude protein, 8.7 % lipid and gross energy 18,8MJ / kg. Mudcrab crablet with initial body weight of 0.037 ± 0.005 g with carapace width of 3.43 ± 0.042 mm were stocked into nine fiber tanks (1 x 1 x 0.5 m3) with density of 50 crablets /tank.
After 5 weeks offeeding trial, results sho wed that the growth rate, survival rate,
feed intake, feed conversion ratio and protein efficiency ratio was similar(P> 0.05) among treatments. Ho wever, there were a trend tha the growth rate and feed utilization increased with increasing feeding frequency in particular when crablet fed 4 times/day including night time. Weight distribution of crablet at the end of feeding trial was in the range of 0.5 to 4 g. Descriptively, feeding frequency of 4 times produced more crablet with larger compared to other groups size, followed successively feeding 3 times and 2 times (Figure 1).