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The quality of larval shrimp plays an important role in shrimp culture. It's difficult to control the source and quality of larval shrimp especially during the consecutive stages of the breeding process. The swimming behavior of postlarvae was studied. I tried to find indicators for the health condition from swimming behavior. Using a video recording system, the larval shrimp behavior was observed from health to death, and by the computer software ETHOM I extracted data of frequency and interval time. The data consist of 3 behavioral events and 11 behavioral states that were described in an ethogram. The result showed that several behavior categories increased with daily age, Including 'the frequency of eyestalks sway', 'the frequency of walking on bottom excluding along edge', 'the frequency walking on bottom or along edge', 'the time of touching with head on bottom'. Conversely 'the frequency of swimming in suspension' and 'the time of swimming in suspension' decreased with daily age. These results showed that the frequency as well as time of swimming in suspension and activity on bottom maybe used as an indicator for postlarval activity. Chi-square tests was used to identify if the time distribution of activity on bottom and in suspension follows the pattern of exponential distribution. The results implied that movement to the surface by the larval shrimp was not an action randomly determined in the early days, and vice versa during the later days. The instantaneous rate of daily mortality was z=-0.54, giving an estimation of survival rate of 58.3%. Experiment also showed that larval shrimp had different survival rate under different color on bottom. The survival rate of postlarval on bottom of black in color is higher than that of white colored bottom.
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