A red-eyed Diamond Angel fish continues incubating the ‘adhesive eggs’ with its mouth, betraying signs of uneasiness at the familiar sight of looming shadows. Hunched over the glass aquarium, childhood friends cum partners of Aquatic Biosystems, Ashwin Rai and Ronald D’Souza, check on the eggs of rarely bred Diamond Angels in order to remove them from the parent for the next step of artificial incubation.
“Artificial incubation of fish eggs, a hatchery practice, increases the survival rate of newly-hatched larvae (fry),’’ says Rai. D’souza and Rai are no ordinary aquarists, they are the owners of the biggest ever scientifically run fish farm in south India, and this makes their cause special.
In May 2007, the fisheries post-graduates launched Aquatic Biosystems at Vamanjoor in Mangalore. They launched a pilot project with 30 small tanks and aquariums. From a series of trials, they evolved methods for successful rearing of ornamental fishes. Buoyed by the market’s response, they initially concentrated on easily bred and less expensive species like Angel, Gaurami, and Goldfish. The hatchery, spread over 1.5 acres of the total 3.8 acres of land, has 500 breeding tanks (aquariums), 200 growing ponds and 130 huge outdoor tanks, each of 10,000-14,000 litres capacity.
“On an average we breed 50,000 to 60,000 ornamental fishes every month,’’ says Rai and D’Souza. Though bogged down by the absence of a cargo complex and other logistical problems, they continue to meet the demand of their clients in Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai who export them to Belgium, Germany, Singapore, Japan and South East Asia.
Today, the infrastructure set up at Aquatic Biosystems is worth more than a crore. Yet the adoption of technology in the unit is just 50 per cent of what it can be. With an annual turnover of Rs 50 lakh, the farm is yet to achieve break-even as the profits are ploughed back into the farm.