ZMT - Leibniz Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung

Aquaculture continues its rapid growth which involves the development of the optimal food source for cultured fish. A lot of potentially valuable species of fish are not yet being successfully cultured due to challenges in finding the appropriate feed for fish larvae immediately after hatching. Larvae of many marine fish require live feed for successful development and growth.

Due to the small size of many fish larvae, easily reared live food such as artemia, is not a suitable option. Copepods showed to be the optimal nutrients source for many marine fish larvae and, depending on the species, present a wide range of sizes. The way copepods swim, stimulates feeding behaviour in fish larvae. Larvae, fed on copepods during early life stages, show faster growth, lower rates of malformation and better health status.

The project is focused on investigating the relationship between the changes of biochemical composition of dietary microalgae and copepods’ nutritional quality as live food for marine fish larvae. Finding the most efficient method for cultivating high nutritional quality copepods for mass production is one of the main goals of the project. Culturing of copepods still presents a lot of challenges, that are planned to be solved in the project.