How To Keep a Tropical fish tank with the tropical fish platy

Ornamental fishery is a popular hobby in the present era. Many people are getting interested in this field. But gradually they develop their hobby into a profitable business.

As a beginner in the fishery field, one can get a good start with red platy fish. Red platy fish is suitable for beginners because it can survive any environmental conditions for a long time. It can withstand high range of temperature, pH and levels of salinity...

Collection and Maintenance of Platy Fish

You can collect the cute and pretty red play fishes from a nursery or a shop. You should bring them by insert into a clean polythene cover which has filled with oxygenated water. You should arrange a rectangular fish tank of suitable gallon to accommodate your platies. You can make the aquarium in proper manner by filling its bottom with a layer of sand and a layer of pebbles. It will be better to introduce water plants into it. You should take care to fill the aquarium with unchlorinated ground water. You should introduce an aerator into the water to maintain the proper level of oxygen in the water, Take care to get light into the tank.

It is essential to clean the tank at suitable interval. Provide correct amount of feed to the fishes. It is better to give pelleted feeds. Do not put extra food. It will lead to contamination of the tank water. It may cause death of fishes. The wastes should take away regularly. You can use a pipe with small diameter for that purpose. It is better to introduce a sucker fish into the tank. It will feed on the fecal material of the platy and help in the process of cleaning.

You can make a great success in the tropical fish keeping by the regular checking of the temperature, pH etc of the water in the aquarium. You can check the temperature level with a thermometer and can check the pH with the pH paper. By analyzing the result you can adjust them through proper ways. You should separate the seeds of platy into a separate tank.

After expertise with these platies you can make a huge success in the exotic fish keeping business.

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Platy fish keeping And Role of Oil Cake Feeds

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.

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