Abstract

The production of good quality marine fish fry for farming has improved in recent years due to scientific and technical advances. However, the mass production of good quality juveniles of many species is still unavailable due to the limited knowledge on nutritional requirements. The understanding of larval nutritional physiology is essential to adapt the larva on inert microdiets by replacing the live food. The knowledge of digestion, absorption, and nutrient assimilation in marine fish larvae are seriously limited by several factors viz. small size larva (∼2–3 mm) at the start of exogenous feeding, mouth gape is also small and requiring small feed-particle sizes (∼50–150 μm), which creates difficulties for microdiet production technology.