The Response of Juvenile Olive Turtle, Lepidochelys olivacea : The Inclusion of Dried Seaweed and Seagrass in Fish Based-Formulated Feed

A common efforts to improve the survivorship of sea turtle in Indonesia is cage nursery program and fed single food type i.e. fresh fish. Such effort, however, has some constrains such as availability and the sea turtle would tend to be habituated because of single-continuous feeding type. Eventually, it could have impact on to their feeding behaviour and survivorship when it is released to the nature. This study concerns on using easily found dried material suh as fish, sea grass and sea weed. Four feeds type i.e. Fish Pellet (FP); F- Syringodium sp pellet (FSp); Fish-Ulva sp pellet (FUp) and fresh fish (FF)- control, were tested. Completely Randomised Design (CRD) with three replication were applied (totally 9 units + 1 unt for control), four individuals for each experiment unit (totally 40 individuals). The feed are given twice a day (i.e. 8 am and 16 pm). The experiment was run for 8 weeks and sampling of growth response were 2 weeks interval. The results showed that the Fish pellet (FP) resulted in superior response for all criterion ( body weight, length and width of carapace) compared to by fish fresh fish (FF), F -Syringodium sp pellet (FSp) and Fish-Ulva sp pellet (FUp). Daily growth (body weight) were significantly different between diet i.e. 0.71±0.19.g/d, 0.54±0.40 g/d, 0.35±0.77g/d and 0.24±0.30g/d for fish pellet (FP), fresh fish (FF), F- Syringodium sp pellet (FSp) and Fish-Ulva sp pellet (FUp) consecutively (P < 0.05). Nevertheless, the response of carapace length and carapace wide were not significantly different between diets (P > 0.05). The food ratio were FCR > 6 classified low, the efficient feed type (lowest FCR) was shown by fish pllet (FP) feed (i.e. 6.79) and the least efficient (high FCR) was shown by pellet of fish + Ulva sp (FUp) i.e. 24,6. The analysis of body weight – carapace length relationship showed negative allometric (b < 3). The economical analysis on feed production budget indicated that pellet of fish feed (FP) was the highest price, such high cost is due to high price of binder (i.e. CMC). Overall. Overall, the study emphasised that fish pellet feed (FP) was potential feed type to substitute conventional feed i.e. fresh fish for pre released juvenile Olive sea turtle at cage nursery.