Growth Performance and Survival Rate of Juvenile Catfish (Clarias gariepinus) Fed Processed Catfish Offal Diet

One of the major problems faced by aquaculture industry today is the high cost of fish feed and this contributes more than 50% of the total cost of production in intensification culture systems. An approach to reduce feed cost is by the substitution of fish meal with alternative cheaper protein sources like fish offal among others. Therefore, this experiment was carried out toevaluate the growth performance and survival of C. gariepinus juveniles fed with diets containing various percentages of fish offal to determine the optimum level of fish offal inclusion in diets of Clarias gariepinus. Five diets of T1(0%), T2(20%), T3(40%), T4(80%) and T5(100%) levels of fish offal’s substitutions were formulated to contain 40% crude protein and similar energy levels. The total of 150 juvenile fish was randomly distributed into three replicates of five experimental groups in a (45 x 35 x 28cm3) plastic rectangular container. Each replicate consist of 10 fish with a mean weight of 25g. At the end of the experiment, result showed that mean weight gain (MWG), survival rate (SR), protein intake (PI), protein efficiency ratio (PER), feed conversion ratio (FCR), specific growth rate (SGR) and relative growth rate of T0 were observed to be statistically p