Application of bioenergetics modelling to fish growth in ponds

Abstract

Applications of bioenergetics modelling to aquacultural systems demonstrate great poten­tial of this technique for solving management problems (Schuur 1991). Bioenergetics mode­lling has been applied to wild populations of coho and chinook salmon, brown and lake trout, cod, haddock, largemouth bass, yellow perch, walleye, and skipjack and yellowfin tu­nas, and to a few cultured species like rainbow trout, channel catfish, and gilthead seabream. Mechanistic growth models potentially appli­cable to red drum have been developed by Kitchell et al. (1978) for tunas and by Cuenco (1982) for channel catfish. Doerzbacher et al. (1988) developed a temperature-compensated von Bertalanffy model to describe growth of tagged drums in Texas bays. However, there seems to be very little published information available for parameterizing a mechanistic growth model for red drum in aquacultural pond systems. Here I present the applications of a bioenergetics-based model developed 10 simulate growth of red drum cultured in Panama.