First Record of Seed Production of Swamp Mud Eel (Monopterus cuchia) in Captivity by Environment Manipulation (original) (raw)

First Record of Seed Production of Swamp Mud Eel (Monopterus cuchia) in Captivity by Environment Manipulation

Swamp eel (Monopterus cuchia), commonly known as ‘cuchia’ in Bangladesh, belongs to the order Synbranchiformes. This fish lives in freshwater habitats and is distributed among different South Asian countries including Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, this fish used to be commonly available in different openwater habitats like floodplains, beels, canals, haors, baors, etc.; now its availability is scarce and considered as a threatened (vulnerable) species according to IUCN Red List. Mud eel is considered as one of the tasty and nutritional food fish for human as it contains high quality protein, calcium, unsaturated fat, vitamin A and E, EPA and DHA. Moreover, it is used for therapeutic and traditional treatment for weakness, anemia, asthma, hemorrhoids, piles and diabetes (Narejo et al., 2003). Culturally Bangladeshi people doesn’t like this fish as the appearance of the fish is similar to snake but most tribal people, some other non-muslim castes and a few Muslims eat this fish. However, mud eel is one of the commercially important fish due to its high demand for export. More than 8,000 fishers, many traders, transporters and exporters are engaged in this sector. Bangladesh exports mud eel mostly to China, Japan, Hong-Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore and USA. In 2002, freshwater eel ranked 4 in terms of frozen food export items (Hasan et al., 2012). Recently, abundance of this species in nature has been declined due to heavy fishing pressure, habitat destruction, aquatic pollution and indiscriminate use of pesticides in crops. Now, it is an endangered fish species of Bangladesh (IUCN Bangladesh, 2003). Despite the increasing demand and decreasing production of the fish in nature, it is high time to think about the commercial production of mud eel because there are lots of opportunities to culture it in shallow and small ponds, ditches, tanks or cisterns. Some people are trying to culture this fish but availability of fingerling in nature is less and no commercial hatchery is yet to produce the spawn or fingerling of mud eel. These are the big obstacles to proceed further with the commercial production of mud eel. Although initiatives have already been taken for artificial breeding and culture of the fish in captivity but no transferrable technology has yet been developed. Lack of knowledge and information on reproductive biology of mud eel are the most important constraints. Therefore this study was undertaken at Department of Fisheries Management, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh, to develop captive breeding protocol of mud eel.