Color enhancement of macrobrachium lanchesteri using purple sweet potato

Abstract

A feeding experiment was conducted on Macrobrachium lanchestri to investigate the acceptability of dietary supplementation with pigmentation and the body pigment enhancement by using natural pigment source. To do this purpose, 400 M lanchestri were devide into eight aquarium. The six aquarium were chooses randomly to fed with two different supplemented diet which is Astaxanthin and purple sweet potato. Another 2 tank of aquarium were fed without supplemented with pigment and served as control. These different diets were fed to the M lanchestri for 8 weeks. After 8 weeks experiment, the food acceptability between 3 different formulated diets has no significantly different. No different in weight gain was found among all prawns. For analysis of body color, the Uv-Vis spectrophotometer had been uses in range of wavelength between 800 nm to 400 nm. The result shown that the shrimp that were fed with purple sweet potato formulated diet have a highest peak compared to other formulated diet. Therefore the purple sweet potato formulated diet can also become a color enhancement for aquatic organism.