Masautso E. Sakala , Confred G. Musuka

Natural Resources Development College, Lusaka, Zambia; 2The Copperbelt University, School of Natural Resources, P.O. Box 21692, Kitwe, Zambia.
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Aquaculture, 2014, Vol. 4, No. 22   doi: 10.5376/ija.2014.04.0022
Received: 29 Mar., 2014    Accepted: 18 May, 2014    Published: 04 Jun., 2014

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Sakala and Musuka, 2014, The Effect of Ammonia on Growth and Survival Rate of Tilapia rendalli in Quail Manured Tanks, International Journal of Aquaculture, Vol.4, No.22: 1-6 (doi: 10.5376/ija.2014.04.0022)

This experiment was conducted to determine the effect of ammonia on growth and survival rate of Tilapia rendalli reared in concrete tanks for 14 weeks using quail manure. It was a completely randomized design (CRD) with five treatments; T1 (control, without quail manure), T2 (0.32kg quail manure/tank/week), T3 (0.40kg quail manure/ tank/week), T4 (0.48kg quail manure/tank/week) and T5 (0.64kg quail manure/tank/ week), replicated two times. Twenty-five fish, with an average individual initial weight of 14 g were stocked per tank, each measuring, 2m × 2m (4m²). Every fortnight individual fish were weighed on a sensitive scale and the length measured on a measuring board to the nearest 0.1 cm. The results of the experiment indicated that fish raised under treatment 4 (T4) grew much faster (ANOVA, P<0.05) than the other groups with weight gain of 246%. T2 had the lowest mean weight gain of 86.08%. The final mean weights ranged from 26.23 g to 47.55 g, while total length ranged from 111mm± 2.29mm to 140.1mm± 2.29mm respectively. The study further revealed that in order to achieve table size growth and survival of fish, 0.48 kg quail manure/week/4m² should be used as optimum for better growth of fish, although no primary productivity was measured to estimate zooplankton biomass. At the same time,daily growth rate was good and within acceptable range for fish of the same size. Survival rate in all treatments was very high, with the lowest being above 60%.The study further demonstrated that higher amounts of ammonia affected growth and survival of the fish in treatment 5 (T5), a tank with the highest amount of quail manure added per week.

Ammonia; Effect; Growth; Survival rate; Quail manure; Concrete tanks