POTENCY OF FRESH AFRICAN CATFISH (Clarias gariepinus) PITUITARY EXTRACTED AT VARIED TIME INTERVALS

ABSTRACT

The cost of donor fish has become increasingly expensive owing to various factors. In order to solve this problem, farmers have explored the idea of buying the head of fish from open markets as that would be a cheaper alternative to obtaining the pituitary. The question of the period it would take for the pituitary to be rendered impotent just in case the farm is far from the market is still unanswered. This project is therefore designed to determine the potency of fresh African Catfish (Clarias gariepinus) pituitary extracted at varied time intervals. The experiment is laid out as a factorial experiment with 5 treatments and 3 replicates in a completely randomized design where T0, T1, T2, T3 and T4 represent the control(immediately), 1 hour, 3 hours, 6 hours and 12 hours after decapitation respectively. Data obtained from this experiment were subjected to analysis of variance (ANOVA) to assess significant difference between treatment groups and the differences in mean were compared using Duncan Multiple Range Test (DMRT) (Duncan, 1995) at p= 0.05. The results reveal a significant (p<0.05) difference in the fecundity across all treatments, recording the best fecundity when induced with pituitary extracted immediately (27604) than at 1 hour after (21278) and 3 hours after (13875) and a similar trend was observed in the hatching performance T0 (49.48%), T1 (40.12%) and T2 (31.06%) with the results recording a significant difference (p<0.05) between T0 and T2. The results also reveal that the latency period of T2(12 hours) was significantly different from those of T0 and T1(10 hours and 10.8 hours respectively) were not significantly different The results also show there was significant difference (P< 0.05) across all treatments for the weight of stripped eggs and weight of eggs in sub sample with T0 having the highest weights (160g and 26.64g for stripped eggs and sub sample respectively) and T2 having the lowest (81g and 21.88g for stripped eggs and sub sample respectively).