Coral Trout, Kerapu Bara, Plectropomus leopardus .


 


Coral Trout, P. leopardus

 

This species already in the Malaysian aquaculture and fisheries industry for quite sometimes, they have been sought after by the fishermen and aqriculturist as well as the seafood restauran operators.  Lately, they are commonly cultured especially in Sabah, Pulau Pinang, Perak, Selangor and Johor. The landing from the wild catches always sporadic all over nation.






Transporting Live Coral Trout in Semporna, Sabah.



This fish getting very good price in local and export markets. In some places in Malaysia, this fish will be caught alive. The off-sizes fishes will be kept  in the cages and be fed with fresh fish until they grow to the market size. Although this method of farming has been debated due to utilisation of natural resources and not that efficient in reducing the pressure on natural stocks plus the usage of food fish to fed the fish, I still consider this method as a value addition process to increase the value of the off-sizes Coral Trout that have been caught by the fishemen.

The commercial farming of this species always using the imported fry from other fry producing nations. There is no report of fry production of this species in Malaysia so far though there could be some unreported productions from the commercial hatcheries.




Distribution of Coral Trout. Source: fishbase.org

 

In the wild, this species always associated with coral areas at the depth of 3m to 100m. It usually can be found from 35°N to 30°S and 99°E to 178°W, from Eastern Indian Ocean to Western Pacific Ocean. The biggest recorded weight was 23.6 kg and with body length 1.2 meters though normally found was around 0.5 kg to 3.5 kg and with body length between 20 cm to 35cm. The longest repoted age of this fish was 26 years. The fish sexually mature at the length of 21-60cm. The adult fish feed on fishes and squids. They are protogynous hermaphrodite (initially as functional females, then turn into functional males at certain age). They normally spawn during new moon phase and having spawning aggregations behaviour during mating process in the reef area.  Their fertilize eggs will float just below the surface of the sea water until hatched. The juveniles of Coral Trout feed on small fishes and crustaceans and normally found in the demersal of shallow coral areas.

In term of price, I saw this species have enjoyed very high price for the last few years with last year highest price of HK$700/Catty and lowest HK$300 and average price of HK$545/Catty making it a very good high value species in HongKong market. The colour of this species also suit to  our Asian taste for happy colours of our foods. Red and golden spotted always associated with good luck and prosperity to us, the unique Asian people.

With good demand and good price, it really supprise to see that this species is not among the popular marine fishes that be able to be reproduced in this country. Perhaps, we do really must strategize our priorities of the targetted species that we must pay attention to. I read an article published in an aquaculture journal back in 2001 that some countries already started producing the fry of this fish way back in 1985.  We hope to see some changes this year and hope there will be some report on the production of this species by Malaysian hatcheries.