Water quality in semi-intensive carp production system using three different feeds

Abstract

In the era of growing demand for sustainable usage of water, all types of aquaculture systems are under reconsideration. Until recently semi-intensive production was concerned to be one of the least polluting. Nowadays, this fact has been reassessed especially in many countries culturing carp in this way. One of the most significant influences on a fish pond ecosystem in semi-intensive carp production is changing its characteristics by adding low quality supplemental feeding. Therefore, the type of fish feed, its physical and chemical characteristics can considerably change the water quality of a fish pond. Aiming to analyze the effect of commonly used feeds (cereals, pelleted and extruded feed) in semi-intensive production on the water quality, an experiment was carried out at three fish ponds during one production season. Even though the results of physical, chemical and biological parameters showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the water quality between fish ponds with different supplemental feed, looking at the overall picture it could be concluded that the pond that had the lowest quality of feed (row cereals), having high organic mater and chlorophyll a during most of the trial period as well as the specific phytoplankton successions including potentially harmful blue-green alga, had consequently the lowest water quality.