Moina as a natural food in aquaculture

Photo credit: Luis Landesman (USA)

Review: Abdel Rahman El Gamal (Founder of the website)

 

Moina is a genus of crustaceans which belongs to the family “Moinidae”. As young moina is less than 400 µm in size, they can serve as the initial food for most freshwater fish species. Monia has been used as the sole food for fry of many ornamental tropical fish species. In order to enhance its nutritional quality, moina should be enriched with algae and yeast before feeding them to fish.

The culture of moina has been easily practiced using horse manure, chicken manure, cow manure, wheat or rice bran, alfalfa pellets or meal, cotton seed meal, spirulina powder, and others.

Moina are characterized by their significant tolerance to adverse water quality parameters. For example, they are able to survive in oxygen-poor environments whereas the amount of dissolved oxygen could be as low as almost zero. Interestingly, the ability of monia to tolerate such very low level of dissolved oxygen is attributed to their ability of the organism to synthesize hemoglobin that greatly enhances the ability of the organism to cope with such poor oxygen situation. Added to that, monia are resistant to withstand an extreme thermal variation that ranges from as low as 5°C to as low as 31°C and above.

 

 

Permanent link to this article: https://fishconsult.org/?p=14464