The use of microencapsulated feeds to replace live food organisms in shrimp hatcheries

Abstract only.An adequate supply of hatchery produced shrimp fry is the major constraint to the intensification and growth of shrimp culture practices. If even 20% of the more than 500,000 ha of the world's existing tropical and sub-tropical brackishwater ponds were to stock at the relatively low density of 50,000 fry/ha/year, it would take thousands of new hatcheries to produce the 25 billion fry required. The availability of artificially produced diets to replace cultured live food organisms would alleviate many of the problems currently limiting shrimp hatchery production by: (i) reducing the level of technical skill required to operate a hatchery; (ii) assuring a reliable supply of a nutritionally balanced larval feed; (iii) reducing sources of contamination and larval disease; and (iv) simplifying hatchery design and capital cost requirements, thereby facilitating small scale hatchery development. Aquatic farms has been working with the Mars Microencapsulation Research Group (MMRG) to develop techniques for adapting current shrimp hatchery technology and design so that MMRG feeds can be used in existing hatcheries as a live feed replacement. Feeding trials have been conducted in commercial hatcheries in Hawaii, Malaysia and Thailand. The results of these trials and the techniques employed are discussed. Growth and survival of larvae fed microencapsulated diets as total or partial replacement of live foods was comparable to larvae cultured in control tanks using the standard operating procedures of the hatchery in which the trials were conducted. In trials to date, larval survival from nauplii to postlarvae has been as high as 70%

Nutritional Quality of Feed Ingredients: Upgradation by Solid State Fermentation (SSF)

Nutritional security, although a part of fwd security has a distinct significance. While agriculture provides food security for the people, fish culture has the potential to provide nutritional security too to them. While fish is a rich agurm of animal protein, it has dsa essential minerals and vitamins for human nutrition. Further, fish is relatively cheaper, compared to other protein source

Delivering Preventive Health Care Information to More versus Less Health-Oriented Consumers: A Comparative Demographic Analysis

Preventive health care (PHC) is the awareness and efforts a person undertakes to enhance and preserve physical, mental, and emotional health for today and future. Although PHC information is widely available, people are not utilizing the information to improve their health. We examine PHC information sources utilized by persons who are more health-oriented vs. less health-oriented. The less health-oriented individuals were identified as: low educational attainment, low income, men, younger age, unmarried, and non-White. A factor analysis produced three primary sources of PHC information sources: print, institutional, and electronic and audio-visual delivery systems. An ANOVA compared how more health-oriented individuals differed from less health-oriented individuals regarding the importance of PHC information sources. As expected, men and unmarried individuals placed less importance on PHC sources information. Younger individuals placed greater importance on institutional and electronic sources of PHC information. Furthermore, non-Whites considered institutional sources of PHC to be more important than Whites, and those without college degrees considered print sources to be more important than those with college degree. There were no differences among income groups

An Attitudinal Analysis of Preventive Health Care Information Users: With Insights from Social Media

As the U.S. health care system continues to restructure itself, an increased emphasis on preventive health care will be a very important component. It is vital that preventive health care information (PHCI) be readily accessible and applied. This research explores the impact of social media as a source for accessing PHCI. Specifically, it examines how individuals rate active vs. passive internet delivery systems (IDS) to gather PHCI. Results of the study indicated that online health forums (active IDS) were the most popular source of PHCI, whereas Facebook and Twitter were most unpopular. On the whole, accessing PHCI via active IDS was strongly linked with those that were PHC oriented, and may become an important source of choice for PHCI

Navigational efficiency in a biased and correlated random walk model of individual animal movement

Understanding how an individual animal is able to navigate through its environment is a key question in movement ecology that can give insight into observed movement patterns and the mechanisms behind them. Efficiency of navigation is important for behavioral processes at a range of different spatio-temporal scales, including foraging and migration. Random walk models provide a standard framework for modeling individual animal movement and navigation. Here we consider a vector-weighted biased and correlated random walk (BCRW) model for directed movement (taxis), where external navigation cues are balanced with forward persistence. We derive a mathematical approximation of the expected navigational efficiency for any BCRW of this form and confirm the model predictions using simulations. We demonstrate how the navigational efficiency is related to the weighting given to forward persistence and external navigation cues, and highlight the counter-intuitive result that for low (but realistic) levels of error on forward persistence, a higher navigational efficiency is achieved by giving more weighting to this indirect navigation cue rather than direct navigational cues. We discuss and interpret the relevance of these results for understanding animal movement and navigation strategies