Culture of fish food organisms

Unit 4 - Copepods

4.1.Introduction
Copepods are common zooplankton both in freshwater and in brackishwater. Their advantages being wide range of body size within and between species. They are natural feeds for larvae and juveniles of many finfish and crustaceans. The early stage nauplii and copepodites can be extremely useful as initial prey for species that have very small mouth gape at first feeding. In the wild, most marine larvae feed on copepod eggs and nauplii during the first few weeks of life. Since a number of larval fish cannot be reared using rotifers as the first feed but have to be reared on either laboratory reared or wild caught copepod nauplii. Adult copepods range from 0.5 to 5.0 mm. The larval stages consist of six naupliar and six copepodite stages.

Copepod