Fish Diseases and Management

6.1.2 Absolute Nutritional Deficiency

Starvation may be due to complete deprivation of food, or to inadequate supplies of diet which is otherwise complete or, in a particular individual or type of husbandry, to behavioural or mechanical preventions of of food. Behavioural starvation is the term used for the  occurring in attempts to rear wild fish, when they refuse to accept artificial foods that they do not recognize. Non-feeding larvae may survive for a month or more and often the first impression with such losses is of infectious disease.