Snakehead Fish Broods: How to Choose and Care for Them

To cultivate snakehead fish, you need to know how to choose the best snakehead fish parents who have superior genes. That way, the snakehead fish seeds produced by the snakehead fish parent marriages can produce superior quality seeds.

Request snakehead fish or Channa striata in the market is quite high. From juvenile snakehead fish to adult snakehead fish, all types and sizes of snakehead fish have experienced quite rapid demand since the start of the pandemic in early 2020 yesterday. The reason is, apart from being consumed, snakehead fish can also be used as an ornamental fish or pet fish at home like goldfish and koi fish. 

It's no wonder that the snakehead fish farming business is quite in demand, just like goldfish farming. To start with, you need to know one of the factors that is quite crucial to the success of snakehead fish cultivation, namely how to choose the parent snakehead fish.

How to Choose a Snakehead Fish Parent

When choosing cork broodstock, you must pay close attention to the physical condition and maturity level of the cork broodstock. Here's a more complete explanation.

1. Physical Characteristics of Snakehead Fish Broods

How to choose the first snakehead fish parent is to pay attention to the physical characteristics of the male and female snakehead broodstock. In general, the physical criteria for superior quality snakehead fish are:

• Body weight between 750-1800 grams
• Symmetrical body shape
• Does not have body defects such as missing fins, broken gill covers, or broken eyes
• Agile while swimming

The specific characteristics of male cork brooders and female cork brooders who are ready to spawn can be seen here:

Physical Characteristics of Snakehead Fish Broods

2. Level of Gonad Maturity

The main criterion for breeding snakehead fish is the level of maturity or gonads. The gonad maturity level of male and female breeders is different. One way to assess gonad maturity is from the physical characteristics of the female breeders, which are characterized by a distended/enlarged abdomen with a soft texture.

If you massage the female's stomach, eggs will come out from there. Then, the color of the female breeder's genitals will be reddish.

The maturity level or gonads of the male breeders can be seen from the weight of the male breeders, a minimum of 1 kg. When the male sires have reached the gonads, you can see a spot on the genital opening which is slightly reddish in color. If the genitals are pressed, a clear liquid will come out.

In addition to the characteristics above, you can also measure the level of gonadal maturity in snakehead fish broodstock from their age. Usually the male sires will reach the gonads earlier than the female sires. Male sires will reach the gonads at the age of 1 year, while female sires will only reach gonadal maturity at the age of 4 years.

Snakehead fish feed has an important role in accelerating the achievement of gonadal maturity in broodstock, especially for female broodstock. Fish feed that contains high nutrition and protein can affect the fecundity and quality of eggs in female ovaries.

Tips for Parent Snakehead Care

After getting the best quality cork sires ready for spawning, now is the time to mate the two sires. Tips for caring for cork broodstock that will and are being bred are paying attention to the condition of the spawning media, the condition of the broodstock itself, and the condition of the maturity of the broodstock.

1. Spawning Pool

You can use earthen ponds, concrete pools, or fiber pools as spawning media for cork broodstock. The size itself varies, depending on the number of sires to be mated.

The minimum size of the spawning pond is 8 mx 6 mx 1 m or 8 mx 5 mx 3 m with a water level between 30-60 cm. With such a size, the pond can accommodate 7-30 total male and female breeders.

To increase the comfort of cork broodstock, especially broodstock caught directly from nature, you can make spawning ponds that resemble their natural habitat, for example by placing water hyacinth plants on the surface of the pond.

Then, the pond used for raising the larvae to become seeds also uses waring. This waring is made from a wooden frame measuring 4 mx 6 m which has a cover on top. Outside the waring also added water hyacinth.

2. Condition of Snakehead Fish Broods

If you get cork brooders directly from nature, then you need to tame them first by quarantining the broodstock in special rearing media for about two months. The feed given is live fish or small shrimp that are still alive, as many as 2-3 puppies per cork parent.

3. Gonad Maturity Conditions

The last tip for caring for the cork parent is to pay attention to the maturity condition of the cork parent. To help the maturity level of the gonads, you can provide fish feed in the form of fresh water trash fish or seawater trash fish with high levels of feeding of 1.5-2% per biomass per day. Another method that can be used is to inject the hormone Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG) at a dose of 300 IU/kg, but make sure you have received the correct dosage and directions before doing this method.