Potential and Prospects of Nutri-Smart Fishes

Small fishes contribute significantly to physical development, health protection, and combat malnutrition of populations worldwide. They play vital role in food security, employment, income, poverty alleviation, and conservation of biodiversity, highlighting their importance in adopting an economically feasible polyculture system for upscaling the aquaculture production. This chapter describes such nutri-smart fish species in terms of their nutritional content and cultural prospectives to attain sustainable developmental goal (SDG). Culture practices for nutritionally sensitive aquaculture species, especially in the undernutrition-challenged areas of the country, are the need of the hour. Simultaneously, conservation of their biodiversity and restoring their populations calls for an integrative approach by the institute to take up juvenile fish ranching programmes inland waters like rivers or reservoirs, protected wetlands areas, convene public awareness camp, formation stakeholders groups for aquatic biodiversity conservation, rejuvenation and restoration of wetlands, governmental regulations, etc. The self-establishment and auto-recruitment behaviours of these small fishes are necessary for research on sustainable utilization of freshwater econiches and improvement of livelihood of the rural poor.