Acipenser gueldenstaedtii Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Acipenser gueldenstaedtii - Assignment Example The use of chemical agents for the treatment of the disease has been limited mainly owing to its less effective nature on the parasite, toxicity to fishes and cost of the treatment process. However, several compounds have been tested for their toxicity both under in vitro conditions and as in-feed components including the mucolytic compound L-cysteine ethyl ester but most of these compounds were either not commercially viable or lacked efficacy. One compound that was found to be both non-toxic and efficacious was bithionol, a phenolic compound which significantly reduced the pathology of the disease when administered as an in-feed compound. The current study examined the efficacy of oral administration of bithionol along with the standard freshwater bath treatment and also to deduce the rate of re-infection The study used mixed-sex, diploid Atlantic salmons with a mean mass of 130.4g and they were acclimatized to sea water conditions over a period of 3 weeks in an aquaculture center. A total of 396 Atlantic salmon (AS) were equally allocated into 9 tanks which were present as three separate ultraviolet light-treated sea water systems. The tanks received constant aeration and the fishes were allowed to acclimatize for 1 week within these systems and were fed with a commercial feed to satiation before commencing the experiment. Each tank was then randomly allocated a treatment and the treatment groups included a control which was a commercial diet with oil, prophylactic bithionol and therapeutic bithionol. The fishes were fed at 1% of their body weight and the daily and weekly feed intake was determined. The feeding was continued for 14 days after which the fishes were exposed to the Neoparamoeba spp., which were isolated from the gills of infected AS by removing the amoeba from the gill s followed by centrifugation and concentration. This