Effect of Dietary Garlic Powder on Growth and Feed Utilization in One-year-old River Puffer Fish, Takifugu obscurus

The most important factor in river puffer (Takifugu obscurus) aquaculture is a technology to quickly grow from fry to the selling size of 300 g and it takes about two to three years for a river puffer fish to grow to mean weight 300 g. This research was performed to investigate the effects of adding garlic powder (GP) to feed on growth and feed utilization of river puffer fish (averaging weight, 86~313g) for 7 months (210 days). 2,400 fish were randomly distributed to each of 3 tanks (800 fish/tank) under a RAS (recirculating aquaculture system). There were three types of diet used in the experiment: one commercial diet (COM) and two diets added 0% (GP0) and 1.5% (GP1.5) of garlic powder, respectively. After the feeding trial, mean fish weight (g) and length (cm) of fish fed GP1.5 (313 g, 23.8 cm) were significantly higher (P0.05) than those of fish fed COM (238.0 g, 21.7 cm) and GP0 (275.0 g, 22.5 cm). Also, weight gain (WG), feed efficiency (FE), protein efficiency (PER), and specific growth rate (SGR) for each experimental group showed high values in the GP1.5 group. The present study suggested that dietary GP for river puffer fish could positively affect growth performance and this experiment is significant in that it investigated the growth effect over a long period of time up to 300 g, which is the sales size of river puffer.