Nursery of tilapia in aquaponic system using biofloc technology

Abstract

Segmenting the supply chain is an important strategy for farmers. However, there are only few reports on the use of nursery to produce tilapia juveniles in Brazil and more studies, mainly related to new technologies, should be performed to diversify the activity. In this context, the biofloc system (BFT) is an interesting alternative. The system is characterized by being an aquaculture technology with minimal or zero water exchange, with high stocking density, supported the formation of a microbial community that provides numerous benefits to the cultured organisms. However, this system can generate wastewater with high concentrations of nutrients. Thus, one of the possible options to environmentally employ the BFT system in tilapia nursery, would be to use the excess of nutrients for, for example, crop production in an integrated farming system. Therefore, the aquaponics emerges as a sustainable alternative production, because it uses the aquaculture effluent to nurture and produce vegetables. Nonetheless, the use of bioflocos technology, mainly integrated with aquaponics, during the post-reversal stage of tilapia production is practically nonexistent. In order to fill this gap, we propose to evaluate the aquaponics production of juvenile tilapia (~ 0.1 to 30 g) and lettuce using biofloc technology. To this end, this proposal has a multidisciplinary team that aims to correlate the data of productive performance (zootechnical parameters) with morphological and morphometric analysis of muscle fibers; chemical water parameters, lettuce crop, fish production and feed utilization, as well as the microbial and chemical composition of bioflocos. It will also be carried out an economic feasibility analysis of the integrated system, thus contributing to the generation of a package of information about the rearing of tilapia fingerlings aquaponics systems using biofloc technology. (AU)