Tamil Nadu   

New technique to spawn catfish species

R. Vimal Kumar

Fisheries college has made a breakthrough in seed production too

Tuticorin: The Fisheries College and Research Institute here has made a breakthrough in seed production and genetic manipulation of `Clarias Batrachus,' a catfish species popularly known as `Magur,' by developing an induced spawning technique for mass production.

The institute developed the method as part of research carried out on seed production technology sponsored by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.

V.K.Venkataramani, Dean, FCRI, told The Hindu that an institute team headed by K. Karl Marx, an assistant professor at FCRI, produced triploid catfish, giving heat and cold shock treatment to fertilized fish by genetic manipulation, so that one set of chromosomes increased.

"The sterile fish thus produced would grow faster than normal diploids and it would weigh more than the fish bred in normal conditions, when it attains full growth," he said.

The institute has also standardised a seed production technology through in vitro fertilization.

"We injected ovatide hormone intramuscularly in a dose of 1.5 ml/kg in female catfish and after 16 hours, the eggs were collected," he said. The adoption of both these new techniques would fetch farmers 6,000 catfish seeds per delivery against 5,000 seeds under normal conditions.

Hatchery unit

Dr. Venkataramani said the institute would set up a hatchery unit in Tuticorin for mass production of catfish seeds using the newly developed techniques.

"At present, there were only two hatcheries available for catfish seed production in the entire country, one at Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh and other at Bhubaneswar in Orissa," he said.

The hatchery unit coming up on an outlay of Rs 19.12 lakh would house a hatchery shed, four brood ponds, 75 larval rearing cement cisterns, a water tank with 20,000 litre capacity, two live food culture tanks, a refrigerator, and a PH meter.

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