| Summary: | To meet the increasing global demand for seafood, efficient and stable aquaculture production is essential. This requires mass production of fish fry and development of suitable live diets for their growth. In aquaculture and the ornamental industry, marine planktonic co- pepods are recognized as preferred live feeds for marine fish larvae over the commonly used organisms Artemia and rotifers. Marine fish larvae fed with the copepods show better survival, pigmentation and growth. Based on this, wild copepods collected from the natural ecosystem have been used as the live diet for fish larvae culturing. Mass culture of copepods under a con trolled environment is desirable due to the unstable collection amount, difficulties in obtaining consistent quality, and risk of parasite/pathogen contamination when collecting copepods from natural ecosystems. Despite being a preferred live feed, copepod use is still limited due to low productivity and cost efficiency when intensively cultured.This review focuses on the status and challenges in the mass cultivation technology of marine planktonic copepods. Section 2 summarizes the importance of live diets for marine fish produc- tion and the challenges of a conventional live diet using rotifer and Artemia from the viewpoint of prey size and nutrient demand of the fish larvae. Section 3 focuses on the characteristics of marine planktonic copepods as aquaculture live diets, and briefly introduces the research history of culturing copepods from the 1970s. Section 4 reviews which copepods have been cultured as target species to date. Section 5 presents the types of diets that have been used to cultivate cope- pods, and what factors should be considered in selecting their diets. In addition, non-microalgal diets such as yeast, bacteria and protists, which are considered to be cheaper to produce than microalgal diets, will also be introduced. Section 6 discusses copepod stocking density, which determines productivity and production cost in the mass culture, and presents how stress ...
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