The daily amount of food required by the Japanese spiny lobster has been studied to gather information in relation to its cultivation. The principal objective of the present work is to describe the relation between food intake and body weight as well as the influence of temperature upon food intake. Experiments was performed during the period from August 1958 to October 1961 on the lobsters of different body weights (raging from 50 to 300 gramms) which were kept in separate cage, being fed with fresh fish meat. The data obtained were summerized as shown in (Table 1).
1) The amount of food taken by a lobster in an over-night time changes with body weight and temperature of water. The relation between the amount of food (
F gr.) and body weight (
W gr.) can be expressed by the formula,
F=a
Wb. Here a and b are constants, whose values depend upon the temperature of water as shown in (Table 2). The rate of feed-ing indicated by
F/
W×100 inversely changes with body weight.
2) In each group of the lobsters of different body weights, the amount of food rexuired regularly varies temperature (T°C) and another formula,
F=
c log
T+
d, may be fitted to their relation. Both
c and
d are constants, which depend upon the body weight. In such a case when
F=0, the ualues of T calculated from this formula on the lobsters of 50 and 300 gramms in body weight come to 15.2 and 16.2°C respectively, while the lobster kept in la-boratory tank stopped to take diet when the temperature dropped to nearly 12°C.
3) Summerizing the figures calculated from the above-mentioned two formulos, the re-lation between feeding rate, body weight and temperature was given as shown in (Fig. 3).
4) The influence of moon light upon the food intake of the lobster was observe, that is, the amount of food required decreased in the full-moon night.
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