In the present study, the sperm number of wild caught Astacus leptodactylus was counted in the beginning of reproduction season. In addition, the reproductive system, testes, and vasa deferentia were weighed, and gonado-somatic index and testicular index were calculated. Twenty-five adult males of A. leptodactylus were used for the study. Significant linear regressions were found between body length (and weight) and sperm count, reproductive system weight, testes weight and vasa deferentia weight (). The mean sperm number of vas deferens for the size range of 41-56 mm carapace length crayfish was 5.72 ± 4.54 × 109 sperm/distal vas deferens (DVD) section. Sperm number ranged from 4 × 108 to 8.5 × 109 sperm/DVD section. The results revealed that an increase in body weight causes an increase in sperm number. For example, mean sperm number was 3.87 ± 2.87 × 109 for the weight range of 15-24 g crayfish, 5.01 ± 2.62 × 109 for the weight range of 25-35 g crayfish and 7.37 ± 2.87 × 109 for the weight range of 36-42 g crayfish. In conclusion, this study provides some data on the male reproduction characters and needs to be improved with details about the reproductive performance of males (i.e., sperm number and quality) in order to reach a maximum reproductive efficiency in captivity.
Growth performance [specific growth rate (SGR), weight gain (WG), food conversion ratio (FCR) and survival rate (SR)], growth hormones [growth hormone (GH-I), insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) and insulin-like growth factor-II (IGF-II)], immune transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) and antioxidant [superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GPx), glutathione reductase (GR), catalase (CAT) and glutathione S-transferase (GST)] response, and heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) mRNA levels were determined in muscle and liver. Our data indicated that final weight, weight gain, FCR and SGR showed significant difference among the six dietary treatments (P<0.05) while there were no significant differences in survival rate between the rainbow trout from supplement fed groups and control group. HSP70 mRNA level expression in muscle was higher in fish fed SSO (P<0.05) while highest level in liver was obtained from fish fed SBO compared to the other treatments (P<0.05). There were no significant differences among treatments for TGF-β mRNA expression level in muscle and liver. In conclusion, growth performance and expression levels of growth hormones, antioxidants, HSP70, except TGF-β were affected by five separate lipid sources. In addition, LO positively increased growth performance of juvenile rainbow trout by means of preventing oxidative stress and HSP70 and, enhanced expression of growth hormone related gene.
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