Obstacles to effective shrimp aquaculture research

摘要

SCIENTIFIC inquiry often begins with a well-defined hypothesis followed by a well-crafted experiment designed to assess the validity of that hypothesis. There are certain attributes of an experiment that need to be present so that meaningful inferences can be made from research results. In aquaculture research, experiments are often conducted where one or more independent variables are manipulated to determine their effects on a dependent variable. For example, in shrimp research, the effect of dietary protein level on shrimp growth may be evaluated. In this scenario, defined diets with variable protein concentrations are randomly assigned to replicated aquaria containing the test shrimp, and shrimp growth is monitored over a defined time period.