Asian Sea Bass Farming Saudi Arabia

Asian Sea Bass Farming in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the process of breeding and producing Asian sea bass or barramundi, which is considered one of the most widespread species in the Kingdom. Its farming has greatly expanded due to its suitability to the climate conditions.

The Kingdom began farming this type of fish in 1998 at the Jeddah Fisheries Research Center, and commercial production started in 2006. The period since 2011  is considered a time of prosperity for farming this species, as it was farmed in various systems, such as ponds, earthen ponds, and floating cages, with production reaching five thousand t in 2014.

Scientific research continued in farming Asian sea bass, and Saudi researchers at the Marine Fish Department in the Jeddah Fisheries Research Center succeeded in 2017  in producing about 91,703 fingerlings of this fish, with an average weight of one g. Fingerlings are fish that have passed the stage of high sensitivity to loss when reared in ponds and are called so due to their size being close to a finger.

Asian sea bass have many advantages that make them suitable for farming, as these fishes are classified as hermaphroditic in terms of sexuality. Most fish reach sexual maturity as males upon reaching the age of three to four years, then they are later transformed into females at the age of five to seven years.

Asian sea bass have long, compressed bodies with a deep caudal peduncle. The head is pointed with a concave shape that bulges in front of the dorsal fin. The mouth is large and slightly inclined, and the upper jaw reaches behind the eye. The teeth are villi-shaped, and there are no canines. The lower edge of the preopercle region bears a strong spine, and the operculum has a small spine and a serrated protrusion above the origin of the lateral line. The lower first-gill arch contains sixteen–seventeen-gill rakers.

The scales of Asian sea bass are large and serrated (toothed). The dorsal fin has seven to nine spines and ten to eleven soft rays. The pectoral fin is short and rounded, and there are many short, strong teeth above its base. The dorsal and anal fins contain scaly sheaths. The anal fin is rounded, with three spines and seven to eight short rays, and the caudal fin is also rounded.

As for its color, it is either olive-brown on the top and silver on the sides and belly (this is usually the color of juvenile fish) or green/blue on the top and silver on the bottom. There are no spots or lines on the fins or body.

Asian sea bass is a river fish that lives in fresh and mixed waters, with the possibility of acclimatizing to live in salty waters. It is found in the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Arabian Gulf. It is a predatory fish, as mature fish feed on crustaceans and fish.

Farming and cultivation of Asian sea bass have expanded globally, and it has recently entered aquaculture due to its many advantages that make it suitable for farming, whether in cages or earthen ponds. Among these advantages are:

Asian sea bass is characterized by high fertility, as a female measuring 120 cm in length can produce from thirty to forty million eggs, so it requires few broodstock to produce a sufficient number of larvae in hatcheries. Larvae remain in nursery swamps with estuarine waters for several months before moving to the ends of freshwater rivers and coastal streams.

Juvenile Asian sea bass remain in fresh waters until the age of three to four years (reaching a length of sixty–seventy cm), where they reach sexual maturity as males, then they move downstream during the breeding season to contribute to spawning.

Due to its tolerance to high levels of salinity, it is farmed in varying salinity levels, ranging from freshwater to salt water. Its predatory nature requires periodic sorting using a grader every three to four days and distributing them to other ponds according to their size to avoid cannibalism. It is reared from the fingerling stage (five to ten g) to the marketing stage (five hundred to six hundred g) within six months, and the fingerlings are stocked at a density of ten fish/m³. Paddlewheels are used in earthen ponds to increase the oxygen level, which should not be less than five mg/L, and the survival rate of fish by the end of the rearing period is more than 90 percent.

Asian sea bass depends in its feeding on diets containing high percentages of protein and fats, and it also feeds naturally on fresh fish, such as mackerel, with fish oil pellets. It is fed industrially using feeds containing 48 percent protein, at a rate of 4 percent of the fish weight in the first month, 3 percent in the second month, 2 percent during the third and fourth months, and then less than 1 percent of the fish weight until the end of the rearing period.