Currently, shrimp diseases like WSSV and AHPND hit and reemerge in several regions. The emergence of disease is affecting shrimp productivity and harvest results. Unpredicted weather conditions are suspected to be the main cause of significant changes in the water source. This phenomenon makes shrimp farming more challenging. The early mortality cases are no longer a new thing for the farmer and causing a series of cultivation failures and losses for the farmers.
To understand this phenomenon, we need to know if shrimp are a living organism that has the most ancient immune system compared to other organisms. Shrimp don't have the memory to create new immune systems to fight the same disease over and over again. It makes shrimp more vulnerable to the disease. However, shrimp still have an adaptive immune system that can be the first aid for them.
One of the efforts that we can do to help to increase the shrimp immune system is by giving them a vitamin C and B complex compound. These vitamins have been proven in the field to help shrimp fight the disease. A herbal compound like Curcumin is also believed to increase the shrimp immune.
All the conditions mentioned above are working at the optimum condition. When the conditions are not optimum, the shrimp are stressed, then their appetite decreases. This symptom may make the shrimp weak and vulnerable to the disease. The shrimp weak condition also happens when the shrimp is moulting. Their behaviour will be defensive and irregular. This condition makes the vitamin, medication, and remedy compound addition less effective and makes the treatment effort harder.
So, to prevent diseases from occurring, maintaining optimum conditions is the key.
How to keep the shrimp cultivation optimum?
Environmental condition and biosecurity play a big role in a farm to achieve optimum cultivation. Thus, good and stable water quality condition become a major requirement for it. But, keeping the water quality is not easy. There are a lot of parameters, from physical, chemical, plankton, and microbiology that need to be monitored and handle when there are anomalies.
Besides that, in order to be able to manage the water quality, we need to monitor and understand other factors, like the water source, pond's preparation and treatment, human resource management, to the facilities, medication, and remedy compound which can be used to restore the pond's condition.
Keep all the activities and farming data recorded will make you able to monitor the condition easier. Frequent monitor of the pond condition and data will make you understand better the actual condition and get the actionable insight to keep the environmental condition stable.
How about the disease?
To get the optimum result in our cultivation, we need to keep the shrimp healthy. In Asia, 90% of shrimp farm already infected at least with one disease that waiting for shrimp immune to weak and compromise.
Briefly, weak shrimp is caused by several factors:
- Excess feed usage.
- Unappropriate usage of the chemical compound.
- Plankton composition change.
- Harmful bacteria domination.
- Pile of waste at the bottom of the pond.
- Extreme weather.
Initially, when these states occur, the most common symptom is the drop of shrimp appetite and dropping of shrimp growth (average daily gain). This condition makes the shrimp immune drop and vulnerable to dangerous diseases like white spot and AHPND. This phenomenon sometimes emerges in the region that has a history of shrimp disease cases. Having information about certain disease cases could help us to prevent the disease from occurs on our farm.
How to prevent the disease?
We will cover this in our next article, stay update with Kabar Udang JALA!!!
