Research on Culturing the Early Life Stages of Marine Ornamental Fish

Growth- and size-selective mortality in pelagic ­larvae of a common reef fish

“…3). Larvae < 2.0 mm SL were not captured, because T. bifasciatum hatch at about 1.4 mm (Holt 2003) and very small larvae can pass through the 1 mm mesh of the MOCNESS. The decline in the number of larvae with increasing size reflects the high mortality experienced by larval fishes.…”

Marine ornamental species from European waters: a valuable overlooked resource or a future threat for the conservation of marine ecosystems?

“…It has been suggested that this is the best approach for minimising the impacts of harvesting wild ornamental organisms, and may even be used to restore depleted ornamental populations (Ziemann, 2001). The current methodologies developed for the larviculture of marine organisms (Calado et al, 2003b;Holt, 2003) may be a precious contribution to the culture of ornamental species (Dhert et al, 1997). Although bottlenecks still impair the commercial culture of the majority of traded ornamental species (Ostrowski and Laidley, 2001), some ornamental shrimp species from Portuguese waters have already been successfully cultured in captivity on a commercial scale (Calado et al, 2003c).…”

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“…In the last decade, the increasing demand of fish by the aquarium trade has stimulated many studies on ornamental larval fish development and nutrition to improve production in captivity and thereby harnessing the aquatic biodiversity [1][2][3][4] . In many developing countries ornamental fish production through aquaculture forms an important way of income generation, but, even if the majority (> 90%) of freshwater ornamental fish are captively bred, only 25 species of marine fish are commercially produced 4 .…”

“…These fish, popularly known as "clownfish" or "anemone fish" are distributed in the tropical and subtropical seas. The popularity of clownfish among the aquarists all over the world is due to the generally small and hardy nature of the fish, their attractive colours, high adaptability to life in captivity, and the interesting display of behaviour due to their association with sea anemones 1,6 . But at present its habitat loss through cage fishing, dynamite fishing, pollution, and climatic warming may have resulted in population decline of the fish 9,10 .…”

“…It has been demonstrated that in the wild, marine fish larvae mainly feed on copepod nauplii and copepodites which are naturally rich in HUFAs 25,26 . Thus it is vital to enrich the most widely used live prey such as rotifers and Artemia nauplii with HUFAs before offering them to the fish larvae in captive fish production 1,27 . Clownfish larvae are fed usually with the rotifer Brachionus rotundiformis, from the same day of hatching, even though complete yolk sac exhaustion occurs after two days 7 .…”