Understanding Predator Fish and Thiaminase

Predator fish is defined as a fish that kills and eats another organism,

common prey would be fish, crustaceans, insects, worms, and so on.

Apart from hunting, occasionally they scavage for dead organism as

food sources. Predatory fish are mostly carnivorous.

They have a big stomach and short intestine designed to process protein as their

main source of energy. Feeding true carnivorous fish with pellets is wrong as you

will notice they poo most of the pellets before they even had the chance to digest

any of the nutrients. It is like feeding pellets to tigers, actually, cats do poorly with

pellets too unlike dogs that are omnivorous by design.

The typical way we keep predatory fish is feeding them with gold fish and prawns,

any type of prawns. Now the problem with this is that most available feeders

Lampan, Gold fish, Carp, Seluang in fact all the family of fish under the Cyprinind

Species has very high enzyme known as Thiaminase enzyme. For some reasons,

carnivorous fish doesn't do well with Thiaminase enzyme.

What is Thiaminase?

Thiaminase is an enzyme, a chemical compound that destroys or inactivates

Thiamine.Thiamine is an important vitamin also known as Vitamin B1. There is not

just one type of Thiaminase, but several different ones, some of which can be

produced by bacteria, fungi, plants and potentially animals.

The lack of Vitamin B1 in humans is called beriberi.

In recent years scientist has a better understanding of high Thiaminase diets

effect. Consistent result from zoos, salmon farms and various other large

predatory fish farm.

High Thiaminase diets symptoms generally result in stunted and poor growth.

Loss of appetite, abdominal swelling and hemorrhage, loss of equilibrium,

convulsions, muscle atrophy and a weak immune system.

In the aquarium setting, we kept seeing the results of poor growth or stunted

growth and sudden death when kept in a high thiaminase diet. Unfortunately,

prawns are an important diet to bring out the color of fish and should not be

avoided entirely. Feeding pellets to carnivorous fish is also not the best way as

they can't process and absorb nutrients from pellets.

Hence vitamin B1 supplement is the best way to counter the effect of Thiaminase

poisoning to ensure our predatory fish grow to its potential massive size.

Comments

Channa Diplogramma

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