Epinephelus fuscoguttatus mariculture in Indonesia: Implications from fish parasite infections

Indonesia plays a major role in grouper supply for the Hong Kong based Live Reef Food Fish Trade. Hong Kong is the biggest consumer of Live Reef Food Fish in the world and around 50% of the grouper originate from Indonesia. In order to match Hong Kong market demands, the Indonesian Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries started to implement plans to intensify mariculture farming, to boost grouper production. One inevitable consequence of this intensification is the increase of fish diseases and parasite infections. Samples of Epinephelus fuscoguttatus were obtained from four mariculture facilities in Lampung Bay (South Sumatra) and one in Pulau Seribu (North off western Java), Indonesia, to investigate and compare the parasite composition. In total 35 parasite species were detected. Different ecological parameters e.g. ecto/endoparasite ratio and Shannon-Wiener diversity Index were utilized to analyze the parasite composition at the different mariculture sites. We also recorded the cultivation methods for each facility including e.g. density of fish in the cages and other cultivation strategies. Our results demonstrate that the feeding strategy and e.g. the stocking density of fish in the cages significantly affect the composition of the grouper's parasite fauna. As trash fish, which enables parasite transmission, is still one of the main feed sources, one of the major future tasks is the search for alternative feed sources and feeding strategies to prevent parasite spread and pathogenic outbreaks. Education of the farm management and unified standards for the often small-size producers are required in order to safeguard grouper mariculture development in the future. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.