Additional information is available at the end of the chapter http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/58703
. IntroductionThe importance of animal genetic resources for wildlife maintenance as well as farming production has become more and more evident in recent years. Fish stocks are globally threatened mainly due to overfishing and environmental pollution. Cryopreservation of aquatic germplasm brings the possibility of preserving the genome of endangered species, increasing the representation of genetically valuable animals for farming purposes and avoiding genetic losses through diseases and catastrophes.In fish, successful cryopreservation of semen from many species has been well documented and cryopreserved semen has been used for reproduction of many wild and farmed species. "ttempts to cryopreserve fish embryos have been conducted over the past three decades, nevertheless successful cryopreservation protocol for long-term storage still remains elusive.In this chapter we cover the cryobiology applications on assisted reproduction for fish farming, focused on embryo and oocyte cryopreservation. Our research group has been working in this area for more than years and the chapter shows the main results that we have achieved from researches on embryos cryopreservation. The barriers that have been identified as a hamper for successful cryopreservation and the sensitiveness of tropical fish embryos to low temperature exposure are also detailed here.Recently, researches have reported that the use of oocytes may offer some advantages when compared to fish embryos, improving the chances of a successful cryopreservation. On this point, the chapter presents the most recent achievements in oocytes cryopreservation from South "merican fish, new trends and future works on this area.© 2014 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
. Brazilian aquaculture growth and researches in cryobiology areaThe history of "razilian aquaculture dates back to 's when the first scientific studies related to fish farming were carried out by Rodolpho von Ihering [ ], however, the farming activities had bit higher impulses only from the 's by creation of research center facilities like CEPT" Center for Research and Training in "quaculture and the insertion of academic activities related to aquaculture at universities. From the mid 's the entry of some private companies boosted the sector, and from the 's aquaculture started to represent an important activity of the "razilian agribusiness.Fish farming is the sector of the "razilian animal production industry which has displayed the highest growth in recent years, reaching , t in , representing an increase of . % compared to its production in [ ]. From the total fish farmed in , about % , t of the production was from South "merican species [ ].The growth in fish...