Juan Carlos Valle^1,3 , César Molina-Poveda² , Miguel Jover-Cerdá³

1 Aquaculture Consulting, Guayaquil, 090902, Ecuador
2 Skretting Aquaculture Innovation, Duran, 090701, Ecuador
3 Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, 46022, Spain
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Aquaculture, 2023, Vol. 13, No. 8   doi: 10.5376/ija.2023.13.0008
Received: 13 Jul., 2023    Accepted: 09 Aug., 2023    Published: 22 Sep., 2023

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.

Valle J.C., Molina-Poveda C., and Jover-Cerdá M., 2023, The effects of manual, time and sound feeding systems on the growth and production of white shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) in semi-intensive farming systems in Ecuador, International Journal of Aquaculture, 13(8): 1-14 (doi: 10.5376/ija.2023.13.0008)

The objective of the current study was to analyze the performance of white shrimp fed using three feeding systems: manual, time feeders and sound feeders, in thirteen commercial semi-intensive farms in three areas of Guayas province (Ecuador) using 535 production lots during the period 2015~2017. The size of the ponds ranged between 3 and 23 hectares, with a depth of 1.2 m, in which the exchange of water was around 1 % a day. The initial weight of the shrimp was 0.04~0.29 g, and stocking density was around 10 shrimp per square meter. The three feeding systems used commercial diets with 35% protein content. The time feeder system gave a higher shrimp yield (1 631 kg/ha) than manual feeding (1 539 kg/ha) and the sound feeder system (1 483 kg/ha). The best results for survival were obtained with the manual system (61.7%) and the time feeder (62.9%) in comparison to sound feeder (57.0%). Current performance results with acoustic systems were lower than reported by other authors, probably because the number of feeders per hectare was low, reducing the accessibility of shrimp to feed, in fact daily feeding supplied was not improved as has occurred in other studies.

Shrimp productivity; Growth; Feeding management; Time feeder; Sound feeder