Now a day's ornamental fish keeping is a popular hobby and business. Many people like to do it for profit and enjoyment. For the beginners in this field the most suitable fish is Red platy (Xyphoporus maculatus). It is very calm fish and it has the capacity to withstand the environmental changes. It is easy to keep these platy fishes. They are very attractive due to their bright red color. There are many other species of platy are available.
The protein is essential for the better growth of these fishes. To satisfy their better growth we can produce and provide oil cake feeds. Oil cakes are very economical and easily available in the market. They are rich in protein, carbohydrates and fats. There are different types of oil cakes.
How can we give the oil cake feed to the platies?
It is very essential to make the oil cakes into pelleted feeds. It will help to minimize the wastage of food and maximum utilization of it. It also helps the speedy digestion of food.
I had used three types of oil cakes in my experiment which had done for finding that which is the most effective oil cake for the better growth of platy fishes. I selected Soya bean meal, coconut oil cake and ground nut oil cake.
From my study I found that the soya bean meal is very suitable for the maximum growth of platy. The category of fishes which had eaten soya meal had shown maximum weight, length, survival capacity and growth rate. From this we can conclude that the soya bean meal which has maximum protein and moderate level of fat and carbohydrate with vitamins is very best for the feed preparation for the ornamental fishery.
Method of Oil cake feed preparation
Here I am going to deal with the soya meal preparation. You can make any oil cake feed instead of soya with this same method.
Ingredients:
- Wheat flour - 25 g
- Rice bran - 24 g
- Poultry Egg - 25 g
- Vitamin - 1 g
- soya chunks powder- 25 g
The above ingredients should mix with 150 ml of distilled water and cooked it in a pressure cooker for 15 minutes. Make it into pellets by using a pelletizer. The pelleted fish feed should dry in an oven and stored in air tight containers.
When I checked the weight and length of my platies after fed with the oil cake feeds for 15 days, the fishes which were provided soya bean meal showed effective and better result than others.
The below graphs show the weight and length gain, growth and survival rate of Red platy fish when it fed with different oil cakes. In all the graphs we can see that the fishes which were provided by soya bean meal show more better result than other which were fed with ground nut and coconut oil cakes.
(Graph 1) showing the average length gain of different groups of platies which were fed with various types of oil cake feeds. The platies fed with soya bean meal shows more length gain.
(Graph 2) showing the comparison of average weight gain. This reveals that the same group of fish that fed with soya bean meal shows high rate of weight gain.
(Graph 3) reveals that the fishes fed with same soya bean meal got maximum specific growth rate (4.8%).
(Graph 4) saying that most survived fishes are also the same group which had been fed with soya bean meal.
So we can conclude that the red platy fish can show better weight gain, length gain and good survival rate when we fed them with soya bean meal. Due to the easy availability and cheap price of these oil cakes we can use them to feed the ornamental fishes and we can improve our business.
I am very interested in Hydroponics. You somehow have this mini-ecosystem growing food in your house. The plant roots in the water feed the fish, the plants eat the fish poo, you eat the plants AND the fish. Does anyone know of any schools in San Francisco that teach classes about hobby of fish keeping?
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