Development of an automatic fish feeder system for Tilapia culture

Abstract

In the last decade, intensive Tilapia culture has become the most important for Thailand. The productive performance of fish farming depends on feeding management, including feed type, feeding frequency and feeding method can have a significant impact on the success of aquaculture fish. Human feeder was usually adopted to feed to apparent visual satiety. However, most available feeding amount tend to over-estimate feed requirements resulting in over feeding, poor feed efficiency, feed waste, poor water quality and nowadays agriculture sectors are lacking of employees. These causes affecting to economic disadvantages for fish farmers. An automation fish feeder could be played an important role to solve insufficient Agri-employees and improve feed consistency. Therefore, this research aimed to design and construct an automatic feeder using Arduino Mega as a microcontroller with contain warning system using solar cell. Experimental tilapia was randomly and weighted 500 fish per each pond (15×50×1.5 m³) with an average initial weight of 473.64 + 8.73 g and reared for four months during April to July, 2019. Fish from each pond were fed twice a day with commercial diet at a rate of 3% body weight, at 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Fifty fish from each pond were random and weighted every month. Two different feeding methods (an automatic feeder and human feeder) were determined. Coefficient of variation (CV) of weight gain, final weight, daily growth rate (DGR), feed efficiency (FE) and protein efficiency ratio (PER) of tilapia were lower, when an automatic feeder was applied compared to human feeder. During the experimental trial the mean value of dissolved oxygen, pH and temperature from an automatic feeder were 5.82 ± 2.63 mg/L, 7.09 ± 0.93 and 27.63 ± 0.89 °C, respectively. These results demonstrate that use of an automatic feeder can improve the weight consistency of Tilapia.