Does commercial probiotics improve the growth performance and hematological parameters of Nile tilapia, Oreochromis niloticus?

Abstract

Oreochromis niloticus be-coming a promising aqua-culture species globally, but recent disease outbreaks and poor growth with commer-cial feed making it chal-lenging. A 60 days long aquarium trial and series of laboratory assays have been conducted to assess the growth performance of O. niloticus fed with a locally available commercial pro-biotic. O. niloticus fry’s were fed with a mixture of basal diet and probiotics supplementation at a level of 0% (control), 0.2%, 0.4% and 0.8%. After the trial phase weight gain, length gain, specific growth rate (SGR), percentage of weight gain (PWG), percentage of length gain (PLG) were not-ed. Among all, highest val-ues of above parameters were observed at T1 (0.2%) treatment group. Weight gain, length gain, PLG and PWG were significantly im-proved in T1 treatment group (p<0.05). Additional-ly, hematological parame-ters including hemoglobin (Hb), white blood cell (WBC) and red blood cell (RBC) were also observed for all groups and T1 was found to have highest values for all these parameters, alt-hough there were no statis-tically significant differ-ences between the values of T1 and T2. The results of this study showed that 0.2% dietary probiotics supple-ments in basal diet would optimize the growth per-formance and hematological parameters of aquarium reared O. niloticus.