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¹ Federal Dept of Fisheries, Cross River State, Nigeria
² University of Calabar, Institute of Oceanography, Department of Fisheries and Aquaculture, Nigeria DOI : 10.4194/trjfas.2010.0206 Viewed : 4400 - Downloaded : 5030 This study was aimed at investigating the possibility of culturing Parachanna obscura in an artificial lentic system. The effects of three different feeding regimes on growth and survival of P. obscura were tested. Likewise, the species ability to act as a controlling agent to the over-population of the Nile Tilapia, Oreochromis niloticus was also investigated. Results indicated that the culture of P. obscura with O. niloticus was quite effective in the recruitment control of tilapia and thus, enhanced individual growth rate of both P. obscura and O. niloticus with average marketable sizes of 109.9 g and 420 g, respectively. Moreover, the growth in weight of the live tilapia experiment wherein the fry of O. niloticus served as food for P. obscura was significantly greater than that where P. obscura fed on both trash fish and artificially compounded feed, producing weight gains of 64.52%, 57.75% and 43.38%, respectively. The feed conversion rates for live tilapia food, trash fish food and compounded feed have been found as 1.3, 2.3 and 3.1 respectively. But, this value for compounded feed is very low according to other moisture foods (live tilapia food and fish food). Therefore, this value for compounded feed does not seem to be reliable. The live tilapia feeding treatment gave the greatest improvement in condition of this species, suggesting this as highly essential feed component for P. obscura. Keywords : Parachanna obscura, lentic system, feeding regimes, growth, survival