Aquatic animal diseases with awareness and perception of freshwater fish farmers on aquatic animal health management practices in tropical archipelago of India

This paper highlights the aquatic animal diseases and stakeholders perception towards aquatic animal health management for better governance and management in freshwater aquaculture sector of Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI), a tropical archipelago of India. Viral, bacterial, fungal, parasitic and nutritional deficiency diseases are reported from the aquatic animals of ANI. Among these, parasitic diseases are dominated in which protozoans, myxozoans, monogeneans, helminth and crustaceans are rampant. Freshwater fish farmers (n = 305) of ANI were interviewed to gain detailed insights on their existing culture practices. Majority of the respondents are not following better management practices such as proper pre-stocking or pond preparation (62.30%), fertilizer application (43.28%), treatment of culture water (63.28%), feeding and fish health management (63.93%) which leads to less productivity. Major issues such as presence of other organisms along with targeted imported fish seeds (86.45%), gasping for air at surface as sign of diseased fish (40.91%), summer as peak disease occurring season (76.36%), use of lime and potassium permanganate (36.07%) to treat the diseased fishes were highlighted by the stakeholders. Binary logistic regression analysis revealed that odds of disease occurrence in South Andaman (odds ratio 0.22) is more than other two districts of ANI and the farmers who are older are likely to have less disease occurrence (odds ratio 1.02) in their farms than the younger farmers. The present study provides a concrete evidence that fish diseases and biosecurity measures are perceived differently by the farmers and also outlined the framework for aquatic animal health management in ANI.