If you feed goldfish carotenoid content of the feed is important. (Among other effects these compounds give the vivid coloration of the fish.) So you should look after other live food richer in carothenoids. Is eathworm economically viable feed?

Earthworm contains rich protein along with other elements including some amount of carotenoid. I feel the earthworms also carries certain amount of heterotrophic bacteria. Feeding gold fish with the live earthworm sometimes cause blackening of stomach which is due to bacterial infection. So care should be taken if you are feeding the earthworm.

It has been recommended to feed breeding stock of gold fish with earthworm enhance the fecundity and survival of young once. Lower invertebrates including earth worms contains some of the unknown growth promotors (may be hormones). So plan your research carefully.

I am agreeing with Dr. Hancz, better compare effect of naturally available carotenoid containing materials (any tuber, seeds, fruit, flowers etc).you can test its efficacy by adding various proportions in feed. If facility available you can also study influence of light intensity on coloration.

Unfortunately Prajith there are no facilities available for that in Guyana. Even if there was a facility i would still be limited because my University provides a limited amount of funding to each student. The earthworms will be taken from a vermiculture unit to avoid having infected worms.

The earthworms would be a cheaper source of feed for the goldfish in Guyana compared to the cost of commercial feed.

Thanks for the infor everyone. If you have any more comments please leave them here as it will be helpful to me.

Also if anyone comes across any research articles relating to my topic please give me a link to it or email it to me.

email: [email protected]

Depending on your resources you could test some of several of classical parameters, such as: biometrics growth (by periods measurement of total lenght and weight), hepato-somatic index or other organ/body index as spleen or gonads and heamatology as indirect measures of health or welfare (some protocols here http://www.aqualex.org/elearning/fish_haematology/english/index.html), protein and lipids profiles, if possible aminoacidic and fatty acid profiles and those compared to that in the food you are using, you could test also a gradient of replacement of dry food with earth worms (i.e. 25%, 50%, 90% and 100% of worms in the diet), if possible you can also challenge you carps to see the resistance to a infection or disease (although it would a more complex approach). About the references, you could search in sciencedirect.com and search by keywords or in journal like aquaculture, WAS, Fish and Fisheries, Reviews in Aquaculture, etc. where you could find examples of approaches to test that.

Good luck!

Are you only comparing how it influences the growth and health of fish? Feeding live food can also improve foraging skills and learning in some fish- check out the work done by Calum Brown and Kevin Laland.

Of course it also have an effect on behavior and a lot of other aspects, the key would be to know which is the focus you wish to assess and what resources you have or you can get to work out that.

Gold fish are Omnivores; they can feed both on meat and vegetable matter. Their diet also shall include green leaves such as spinach, lettuce (normal as well as rumani), etc., which can be blanches in hot water for few minutes before feeding them, and the leaves can be shred to small pieces and fed. Another very good food is earth worms. Earth worms are good laxative and they are also rich in raw protein and fats. Gold fish love earth worms. But care shall be taken to put the earth worm cardboard box with a wet tissue for two days to remove all the mud in their stomachs before feeding. Earth worms normally do not carry any parasites. Gold fishes also can take other food such as flakes, pellets etc,. Main point to remember is to feed them varies diet rich in vegetable matter. Flakes and pellets containing Spiriulina can enhance their growth and colours. Gold fish can eat nonstop, so care shall be taken to restrict their feed and also limit the number of feedings to two or three times per day. Gold fish some time go on eating until they are so much bloated that they can hardly move. Then they go down to rest without movement. Such kind of eating will soon result in swim bladder problems, so always feed varied diet and just enough to keep hungry to make them Active Always.

These are the objectives i have developed so far for the research

1. To analyze the physiochemical parameters of aquarium water before and after completing experiment.

2. To analyze the nutritional composition of live, commercial and combination feeds (i.e. mixture of live and commercial feed).

3. To determine the feed efficiency of live feed (earthworm) and also commercial feed.

4. To check the feed efficiency of a combination of live and commercial feed.

5. To adapt if the live feed can be used as a cheaper and alternative feed source for the fan tail goldfish (Carassius auratus).

Thanks for all the information so far everyone

I will be doing a biochemical analysis of the fish to test for protein, carbohydrate, lipids & vitamins

Question: In doing the statistical analysis should i use t-test or ANOVA?

N.B - I am not too familiar with either of these test.

Sounds Ok, don't forget to check the amounts of not consumed food, since even carp have food preferences. For the statistics if you have more than one treatment at the same time you should go with an ANOVA if your samples meet at least the requirements of normality and equal variances, and then a post-hoc test i.e. Tukey

Thanks Dr. Patricia. I did not think about the amount of not consumed food.

I agree with suggestions by Dr. Patricia.

Generally, growth of fish is governed by the type of food, intake, frequency and its ability to utilize the nutrients. The fishes should have the access to feed up to satiation for their optimum growth. While overfeeding leads higher FCR, input cost, waste accumulation may affects water quality.

Live feed like worms can be given during feed formulation because gold fish will not accept live fish especially worms directly, so add dry powder of earthworm during feed formulation.............ihad tried it.

If the eat the entire worm the can choke... and die...

The way of feeding fish with live feed is important, considering size of live feed, and size of fish taking on, especially for opportunistic feeder as like gold fish. I do agree with Patricia regarding not consumed feed, and we should be careful not to overfeed! since cost-effective analysis is crucial for evaluating feed formulation and performance, protein efficiency, particularly incomplete protein digestion should be determined while working with live feed. For statistical analysis, one-way ANOVA with multiple comparison can be accepted. additionally, water quality variation level may be considered for feed performance analysis.