Biofloc-copefloc: A Novel Technology towards Sustained Aquaculture

Abstract

Aquaculture being the precious source of fish protein is increasingly practiced worldwide. It offers plenty of opportunities to eradicate poverty, food shortage and malnutrition besides increasing the economic growth and ensures better use of natural resources. It is necessary to increase aquaculture production to meet the increasing demand per capita in parallel to the rise of the global population. Therefore, the aquaculture would provide the most reliable supply of seafood in future. Among the various aquaculture systems, shrimp farming is a rapidly increasing industry that has been supporting the growth and supply of the crustacean-protein to consumers around the world. However, there have been many controversial issues in aquaculture regarding food quality, food nutrition, food safety, and sustainability, that are directly related to the nutrition and feeds for farmed shrimp. There are some issues in the area of shrimp nutrition that require consideration, viz., feed and nutrient efficiency, overfeeding and waste, fish meal and fish oil replacement, shrimp and fish health, biotechnology, and human health concerns. The development of aquaculture hatchery and aqua-industry through innovative farming technology is the need of the hour. The new concept via novel technology has been introduced in the shrimp farming sector too where the farmers are building copefloc instead of biofloc to stimulate the production of crustacean copepods in the system. The copefloc would not only act as excellent natural food but also act as an immunostimulant to keep the diseases at bay. The perspective, manner of copefloc technique (CFT) is considered as a promising novel technology for the aquaculture system. Copefloc is used as new live-food in larviculture of shrimp culture industry in Thailand for the first time in the world. This new Biofloc technology-based floc particles are being used as main live food for culturing shrimps, and not for use the food industries. BFT and CFT of recirculation aquaculture system (RAS) is the most advanced technology to the shrimp farming industry that provides natural live feed "Copepod" for post larvae (PL), prior to stocking in ponds. That would enhance the water stability, maintain good survival rate (SR), promote fastest growth rate (GR) and high profitability while making it totally sustainable without any negative impact to our environment. This paper reviews the advantages of using a combined BFT and CFT, a novel technology system in sustainable shrimp farming.