Microbioal assessment of el-max farm

Abstract

El-Max fish farm is one of the most important natural fish farm in Alexandria which is suffering from die-off of large amounts of fish. Facing this problem we must deal with the estimation of the quality of the farm raring unit environment (ponds). Analysis of samples using the Bray - Curtis similarity coefficient test yielded that, the input and El-Khandac were similar at (97%), while the eight ponds were classified at different level of similarity as follows: pond1 (B1) and pond7 (B7) were similar at (86%), B2 and B3 were similar at (90%), B14, B10 and B9 were similar at (93%), where as B11 is singly separated at (83%). Moreover, results indicate that distribution of the different bacterial groups was affected with one or more chemical parameters such as ammonia, nitrates, phosphates and alkalinity. Since the similarity between ponds was high, we can consider them all as a unique environment from the physicochemical and microbiological point of view.