Artificial Propagation of Indigenous Ornamental Fish Species via Nutritional Manipulation for Stock Enhancement and Conservation as a Step towards Environmental Sustainability: A Review

Indigenous flora and fauna of a particular habitat greatly impacts the environment in maintaining an ecological balance and equilibrium for the normal functioning of the ecosystem as a whole. Native fishes play a major role and holds a major niche in the ecosystem which needs attention at the moment for their conservation and protection, failure of which may prove to be detrimental to the environment. The rapid developmental activities and industrialization taking place currently are leaving a negative impact upon the natural ecosystem. These activities are a major reason for loss of habitat, deterioration, pollution, and degradation. The ornamental fish industry is a budding industry in India and the indigenous fish fauna of the country offers a good market but unfortunately, so far, the requirements and demand are fulfilled from the natural stock through manual collection. Rigorous exploitation of these species may result into loss of species diversity or reduction of stock, provided, anthropogenic causes necessitated by development and industrialization are already acting upon the ecosystem. Therefore, in this review we will discuss the implementation of captive breeding techniques through nutritional manipulation for fish species so that the wild stock is not made vulnerable and instead, the same shall be enhanced through ranching. Though this technique offers certain limitations such as genetical quality compromise, inferior breeding performance etc., nevertheless it still is a major tool in conservational biology. The review will provide insights to researchers on how to achieve captive breeding success by manipulating nutritional component in fishes and eventually with the information made available in this document certain practical implementations may be necessitated which will help us move closer to the broader aspect of biodiversity conservation and sustainability.