Effect of Beef Liver Meal in maturation diet to enhance reproductive response of domesticated Kelah (Tor tambroides)  

Kelah (Tor tambroides) is a riverine cyprinid, commonly known as the Malaysian Mahseer. As a fish with excellent taste however, the price is expensive that may fetch between USD 180 - USD 300 for a 1 kg live specimen.  This has led to increase in fishing pressure on the natural resources. Artificial breeding of Tor tambroides for conservation and aquaculture is important and will ensure their survival and may reduce the negative impacts on natural stocks. However, to support this programme, it is need for specially formulated maturation diet to optimise and enhanced its maturity. Arachidonic acid (ARA) that can be found in beef liver was known to be a precursor for prostaglandins hormone (PGE2) to enhance maturation activity for fish broodstock. The objective of this study was to  evaluate the effect of beef liver meal (BLM) to enhance reproductive response in the maturation diet of domesticated Kelah broodstock.

The study was conducted for 18 months using a fully indoor recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) tanks. 40 individual female Kelah broodstock of same parental breeding pair was individually tagged using PIT tag and randomly distributed in four 5MT RAS tanks. The experimental fish was fed with treatment diet, KM (BLM inclusion) and control diet (commercial diet) in duplicate. All diets were isonitrogenious with 34% CP and 6% CL. After six months of feeding protocol the sampling for breeding performance was conducted every three month intervals after undergoing artificial propogation for Kelah according to De Silva et al. (2004). The parameters for reproductive performance were breeding response, gonadosomatic index (GSI), relative fecundity, hatching rate, water hardened egg diameter and water hardened of individual egg weight were analysed and statistical tested using T-test.

After 18 months of experimental period, the result significantly (P < 0.01) showed an improvement of Kelah (final average size of 1.7 ± 0.2 kg) maturity with a 40% breeding response within the population compared non-response to Kelah fed with control diet. While, the comparison of some breeding performance of Kelah broodstock fed with different diets were shown in the presented table below.

The significant impact on breeding response and performance on Kelah broodstock fed with diet that had been formulated with BLM might be influencing the fish reproductive physiology. Further study are still ongoing to determine the effects of PGE2 hormonal level and reproductive performance of Kelah feed with broodstock diet.