Algae ponds can be extremely useful if you’re producing fish, prawns, and other types of aquatic life. Growing your own feed for fish and crustaceans reduces the investment you’ll need to make on food plus the shipping costs associated with importing specialized diets. In particular, algae make an ideal food for the fingerlings and fry of herbivorous fish, and it can even serve as a primary food source for omnivores since it has such a high protein content. What’s more, you can even feed certain types of algae to promote desirable characteristics in fish and mollusks. As an example, salmon farmers will often feed red algae to make the salmon’s meat pinker. In other types of aquaculture, certain types of algae may be used to increase the nutritional value of fish and mollusks.
Prawns, mollusks and filter feeders usually can’t be fed a commercially prepared food, which means algae ponds may be essential if you’re producing any of these species. You can also use algae to create your own food chain, if need be. For instance, you can produce algae to feed brine shrimp. From the brine shrimp, you can harvest eggs that can be dried and used as feed later, or you can even feed brine shrimp to carnivorous fish. In fact, where fish are the end product, you may find that creating an algae to brine shrimp food chain is more efficient because the brine shrimp make better use of the algae’s protein than the fish will.
