Rockpool shrimp Palaemon elegans rathke, 1837 culture: to evaluate its potential as a source of live feed for selective marine post larvae in mariculture.
In 2017 the Conservation & Education unit provided the facilities, equipment and assisted one student from Birkbeck University of London with her BSc. Project dissertation project related to the culturing of the Rockpool shrimp Palaemon elegans.
This dissertation investigated the possibility of culturing the Common Rockpool Shrimp (Palaemon elegans) by using different diet sources; live Rotifers, live Artemia and powdered Spirulina, up to the shrimp’s post-larval stage. The trial investigated whether rearing Palaemon elegans is successful and viable enough to be used as a live feed for different commercially grown post-larval mariculture species. With the increasing popularity of aquaculture, the need for replacing unsustainable practices such as using wild sourced fishmeal is becoming more important due to the evident environmental strains it is creating. The lack of available research on alternative larval rearing diets is contributing to the overall stagnation in the development and knowledge in efficiently rearing healthy larvae species. 16 individual tanks where set up and the different food sources (Rotifers, Artemia and Spirulina) were given to the Palaemon elegans larvae to determine which feed resulted in the best overall growth. In this case, the Rotifers group was evidently the most successful, where it had the most uniform growth throughout all the tanks. The Control group also had a consistent growth, but the lack of microalgae enrichment Nannochloropsis in one of the tanks skewed the overall growth values.
The larvae fed on Artemia had an erratic growth pattern where the range of 3.52mm was the largest from all the other food groups. Unlike the other feeds, the Spirulina group did not have the chance to reach post-larval stage as the whole population crashed before they reached this stage. The project produced a total of 3,669 post-larval shrimp; and thus the outcome was that Palaemon elegans was indeed a viable species to commercially culture for feeding other maricultured species.
