Determination of a predictive growth model for cultivated African catfish Clarias gariepinus (Burchell, 1882)

In recent years, aquaculture of the African catfish Clarias gariepinus (Burchell 1882) has experienced rapid growth in Africa, Asia and Europe. In order to improve its rearing systems, it is imperative to determine the individual growth patterns of the species. Individual fish growth is relevant when evaluating commercial viability, planning the time of harvest or projecting profits. In this study, we analysed the growth data of African catfish juveniles reared in an indoor freshwater recirculation aquaculture system and fed five different commercial aquafeeds over a period of 111 days. We fitted five nonlinear growth models—von Bertalanffy, Gompertz, Brody, Richards and logistic—to the weight data and applied the Akaike information criterion, the sum of squares and the maximum likelihood to determine the model that best describes the growth data of the species under the controlled culture conditions. According to the goodness-of-fit criteria, the Gompertz model was consistently the one that best described the growth of African catfish. The F-test showed significant differences (p = 0.05) for one of the experimental feeds (T1,2) that produced the superior growth in terms of rate and biomass.