Abul Farah Md. Hasanuzzaman , Mousumi Das , G.M. Zillur Rahman , Khandaker Anisul Huq

Fisheries and Marine Resource Technology Discipline, Khulna University, Khulna-9208, Bangladesh
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Soil Biology, 2014, Vol. 5, No. 1   doi: 10.5376/msb.2014.05.0001
Received: 04 Oct., 2013    Accepted: 07 Feb., 2014    Published: 25 Apr., 2014

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abul Farah Md. Hasanuzzaman et al., 2014, Production Performance and Nutritional Composition of Perionyx excavatus (Perrier, 1872) Fed Different Composite Organic Food, Molecular Soil Biology, Vol.5, No.1 1-8 (doi: 10.5376/msb.2014.05.0001)

Perionyx excavatus is a potential earthworm species for vermicomposting, and of live feed for fish as it contains high quality protein with excellent amino acid profile. Its limited seasonal abundance in natural as well as the associated risk of bioaccumulation of toxic products in wild earthworm inflate large scale vermiculture of this species. To establish a suitable food composite for mass culture of that species, the present study evaluated the production performance and nutritional composition of P. excavatus fed on four different organic food composites namely, C, T_1, T₂ and T_3. Initially five adult wild earthworms were stocked in cemented tanks, and reared them with feeding respective organic composites at the rate of 10% of their body weight twice a week for 120 days. To determine the growth rate, newly hatched larvae of 0.12-0.16 mg collected from respective treatments was reared in the separate tubs at the stocking rate of 5 larvae tub^-1 for 60 days. Temperature, pH, moisture, total nitrogen and organic carbon contents of rearing beds, and growth rate of earthworms were recorded at every fortnight. The treatment T₃ was found to be effective for production performance (2.508 ± 0.75 larvae week^-1) while the T₂ gave higher growth rate (0.16 g·worm^-1·week^-1) to this earthworm species. The highest protein (48.36%) and moisture content (81.85%) were recorded in T₂ but T₃ contained the lowest protein (39.65%) and the highest lipid level (4.82%). The ash content was found not to be significantly different among all treatments. The results of this study demonstrated T₃ composition as good medium for reproduction, and T₂ composition as better food composite for rearing P. excavatus. The outcomes of this study may provide essential information towards the mass culture of this species.

Perionyx excavatus; Organic Food; Production; Growth; Nutritional composition