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Abstract

The current research aimed to evaluate the effect of folic acid (FA) and chitosan supplementation as feed additives on growth performance and hematological indices of common carp. A total of 100 of Cyprinus carpio with an average initial weight of 60 g were used in this study. Fish were randomly allocated into five dietary treatments (20 fish/treatment, two replications per treatment) as follows: the control group received a basal diet without additives. Treated groups T1, T2, and T3 received diets containing 2, 3, and 4 g chitosan/kg diet, respectively, each supplemented with 5 mg FA/kg diet, while T4 received 5 mg folic acid/kg diet only. Following a 75-day feeding trial, weight gain (g) and relative weight gain (%) were significantly increased (P<0.01) in T2, T3, and T4 relative to the control group. Specific growth rate (% d-1) revealed significant increased in T4 (0.80 ± 0.07) compared to other groups (T1, T2, T3). Feed conversion ratio showed a significant decrease (P<0.05) inT3 and T4 (5.50 ± 0.14; 5.40 ± 0.19) compared to the control group (6.60 ± 0.29). Considerable changes were registered in hematological parameters; particularly, T3 showed the highest values in red and white blood cell counts, hemoglobin content, and Packed cell volume relative to the control group. Findings of the current study illustrated the positive effect of chitosan (3 and 4 g/Kg diet) and FA (5 mg/Kg diet) supplementation. This acts as an effective dietary strategy to improve growth performance and physiological health in aquaculture species.

Keywords

Common carp, Feed conversion, Fish health, Hematology, Nutritional supplementation

Subject Area

Biology

Article Type

Article

First Page

3502

Last Page

3510

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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