Dietary Prebiotics and Probiotics Influenced the Growth Performance, Feed Utilization and Body

Indices in Snakehead (Channa Striata) Fingerlings

1Mohammad Bodrul Munir*, 1,3Roshada Hashim, 4Mohammad Suhaimee A M and 1,2Siti Azizah Mohd Nor

1School of Biological Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Penang, Malaysia

2CEMACS, Universiti Science Malaysia, Teluk Bahang, Penang, Malaysia

3Faculty of Science, Universiti Sains Islamic Malaysia, 71800 Bandar Baru Bangi, Malaysia

4FRI Pulau Sayak, 08500 Kota Kuala Muda, Kedah, Malaysia

*Corresponding author: hsjewel730@yahoo.com

Abstract: This study was conducted through a feeding trial with two phases aimed to determine the

influence of selected dietary prebiotics and probiotics on growth performance, feed utilization and

morphological changes; and the duration of their effectiveness for a period of post feeding without any

supplementation. Triplicate groups of fish (22.46g + 0.17) were raised on a feeding trial with six different

treatments respectively three prebiotics- 0.2% β-glucan, 1% glacto-oligosaccharides (GOS), 0.5%

mannan-oligosaccharides (MOS), and two probiotics- 1% live yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae),

0.01% Lactobacillus acidophilus (LBA) powder, and a control (non-supplemented diet. All diets contained

40% protein and 12% lipid. Fish were fed to satiation three times daily. No mortalities were recorded in

Phase 1, however 14% was recorded in the control and prebiotic amended fish in Phase 2. At the end of

Phase 1, the growth performance and feed utilization were significantly highest (P

positive influence on the growth, feed utilization and survival of Channa striata fingerlings compared to

supplementation with prebiotics.

Keywords: Prebiotics, Probiotics, Growth Performance, Snakehead (Channa striata)

INTRODUCTION

The striped snakehead, Channa striata (Bloch, 1793), is a carnivorous freshwater fish, which is widely

distributed in Asia. This is a valuable food fish (Wee 1982) contains higher protein (Annasari et al., 2012),

high quality of flesh, low fat, less intramuscular spines and medicinal qualities (Haniffa and Marimuthu,

2004) particularly it’s extracts like fins, scales which are a good source of albumin, and it is traditionally

used to treat injuries, burns. Therefore snakehead aquaculture has recently gained more attention and

the production yield is increased from 16 ton in 1998-2000 to 42 ton in 2010-12 (FAO 2012).

The persistent goal of new world aquaculture (FAO, 2014) is maximizing the efficacy of fish

production with optimizing the profitability. Therefore, the global aquaculture is become more intensified.

This may lead to being high fish yields as well as fish production in per capita area; in contrast it is

directly evolving to deteriorate water quality resultant to out-breaking of fish diseases (Bondad et al.,

2005). Farmers usually control this fish disease using different antibiotics as feed supplements. The

excessive use of antibiotics resultant to develop the antimicrobial resistant pathogens, inhibit or kill the

beneficial microbiota in the gastrointestinal (GI) ecosystem, and finally making antibiotic residue into fish

body that accumulated in fish product to be harmful for human consumption (FAO, 2005). The European

Union banned once to import of fish fed antibiotic feeding supplements on 2006. After that, the

aquaculture scientists, researchers started to explore new strategies substitute of antibiotics in feeding

and health management in fish aquaculture (Balcâzar et al., 2006). They evaluated the new dietary

supplementation (Diana 1997; Abdelghany and Ahmed, 2002) on dietary prebiotics, probiotics,

symbiotics, phytobiotics and other functional dietary supplements (Denev, 2008).

The present study was carried out with similar objective to determine the influence of selective

single dose of dietary prebiotics and probiotics on growth performance, feed utilization & body indices

of Channa striata fingerlings and the duration of their effectiveness for a period of post-feeding without

any supplementation. In general, dietary prebiotics is a non-digestive feed ingredient (Gibson and

Roberfroid 1995) that benefits fish by selectively stimulating growth (Grisdale et al., 2008, Talpur et al.,

2014), while probiotics are live bacteria or cyanobacteria, microalgae, fungi etc. (Fuller, 1989) having

beneficially affects the host growth by improving its intestinal (microbial) balance (Al-Dohail et al., 2009,

Dhanaraj et al., 2010).

METHODOLOGY

Experimental Fish and Husbandry Conditions

The study was conducted at the Aquaculture Research Complex of Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM),

Main Campus, Penang, Malaysia. It was an indoor preliminary study to determine the long term effect of

dietary prebiotics and probiotics feed supplements on snakehead fingerlings growth and health status.

This paper evaluated the effect of dietary prebiotics and probiotics on snakehead fingerlings growth

status only. The study was conducted in two phases without any interval. The first phase was comprised

of 16 weeks while the second phase was the following 8 weeks totalling 24 weeks continuously from the

starting.

A total of 360 snakehead fry (3-4 inch sized) were purchased from the local fish farm, reared for

4 weeks into two outer cemented tanks (2m x 1m x 0.5m) with commercial sea bass pellet feeds

contained 43% crude protein and 6% crude lipid. This was done because of making adaptation with the

environment to save the fish from mortality. Water temperature and pH were recorded twice in a day. The

fishes’ survival was recorded about 80.5%. After 4 weeks, a total of 180 pieces (10 fish/ tank and 3 tanks

for each feeding trial) of snakehead (Channa striata) fingerlings (av. wt. 22.46 g + 0.17) were raised on

experimented diets with control in 18 rounded plastic tanks (200L vol.).

Experimental Diets

In this study, 5 experimental diets along with control (total 6 diets) were prepared at FRI Pulau Sayak,

Kedah and carried to the USM Aquaculture Complex with the air tightened pole-ethylene bags. The diets

were kept at -20ºC frozen temperature. The 5 supplemented diets were 3 prebiotics, 0.2% β-glucan

(Macrogard(R)), 1% glacto-oligosaccharides (Vivinal(R) GOS syrup, Friesland Campina Domo,

Netherland), 0.5% mannan-oligosaccharides (Alltech(R), Actigen 1, USA), and 2 probiotics, 1% live

yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Alltech(R), YEA-SACC 1026, USA), 0.01%

Lactobacillus acidophilus powder (SigmaR LBA-108 CFU), respectively.

The control diet did not contain any feed supplementation. All the prepared diets were contained

40% protein and 12% lipid. The feed ingredients and proximate composition of diets (Table 1) were

analysed as described in AOAC (1997).

Feeding Trial

There was only one feeding trial conducted with two phases. The first phase was comprised of 16 weeks

with dietary prebiotics and dietary probiotics, followed by another 8 weeks of the control diet in the

second phase. Triplicate groups of fish were raised with the control in indoors 18 tanks (200 litre water

capacity) and fed to satiation three times daily. Water temperature and pH were measured twice daily

(early morning and late afternoon), although these two water parameters were not too much changed

because of indoor closed non flowing continuous aerated water environment, but helped to know about

the cleanness of the tank aquaculture.

Growth performance

Fish weight was taken fortnightly in Phase 1 from the 4th week of the feeding treatment and weekly in

Phase 2. Every feeding treatment had 3 biological replicates and each replicate contained 10 numbers of

Channa striata fingerlings. Before taking the weight of each fish, the water in each replicate tank was

released gradually and then the fish were taken using a soft scoop net and kept the fishes into another

covered container for a while. The fish was taken individually with a small soft towel, dried using tissue

and measured the weight and length; after that the fishes were released to their respective tanks filled by

the clean new water. For analyzing the growth performance, the conditional factor (CF), the relative

growth (RG); the specific growth rate (SGR), survival rate (SR) were determined using different formula

described by Austreng (1978) Busacker et al., (1990) and Ahmed et al., (2002). Moreover, the protein

efficiency rate (PER), food conversion ratio (FCR) was calculated in order to measure the efficiency of

the test feeds in terms of growth for fish using the following formula (Abdel T. et al., 2008; USAID, 2011)

CF(%):{(Final Weight (g) / L3(cm)) x 100}

RG (%): ({Final weight-Initial Weight / initial weight} x 100)

SGR (%): (ln final weight- ln initial weight / nos. of days) x 100

SR (%): {(Final Number of Fish / Initial Number of Fish) x 100}

PER: {(Final Weight-Initial Weight) / Protein Intake}

FCR: (Total Feed Consumption / Weight Gain of Fish)

The hepatosomatic index (HSI), visceral somatic index (VSI)