Using Experimental Microcosms in Shrimp Research: The Growth-Enhancing Effect of Shrimp Pond Water

After preliminary six week experiments showed that shrimp pond effluent from an intensive culture growout pond had the capacity to nearly double shrimp growth in laboratory tanks, an 18 day experiment was designed to determine if similar results occurred in the presence of high quality feeds. The results presented here corroborate the hypothesis that autochthonous factors in shrimp pond water stimulate shrimp growth. These results revealed that performance of currently available shrimp feeds is greatly improved in the presence of pond effluent, regardless of feed quality. Increased feed performance did not appear to be an artifact of supplemental feed availability in pond effluent. The implications from these experiments are that, even in intensive culture systems (above 40 shrimp per m²), in-situ sources of nutrition play an important role in shrimp growth.