In response to the letter Tilapia genetic fiddling fishy by M Nasir, I think your readers have receive wrong information about ‘Gift’ or have maybe you've misunderstood the information contained in that letter.
‘Gift’ stands for Genetic Improvement of Farmed Tilapia, a natural breeding programme to improve genetic gains particularly on growth. The Gift method is actually a method of selecting the best family breeders or brood stock that performs well in terms of growth and also a method to avoid inbreeding.
Gift should be used by our local farmers if they really want to make big money. We have a few hundred of this Gift family of fish and those families with high performance will be selected to get ‘married’ each year to continue to produce improved generations.
No hormones or other curious stuff are used, just a tag number on their body. The letter said: ‘The scientists from World Fish Centre (WFC) claim that this is done in order to produce bigger fish at a faster rate. But is this the real reason for reversing the sex of these tilapia fish?’
I believe this is misleading. There are fish farmers who have used growth hormones, namely ‘17 alpha methyltestosterone’. There was once a workshop to train local farmers on how to use this hormone but they already seemed to know about it. I'm pretty sure few fish farmers in Malaysia use this hormone but I wouldn’t know the exact number.
Our farmer are very clever with some of them even travelling overseas to learn more about aquaculture management. They even bring back new strains of fish to cultured here in Malaysia and we really won’t know whether these fish are genetically modified and safe to be consumed.
But I'm glad to say that WFC fish is pure, natural and original with none of their DNA modified.
The writer is attached to the Biodiversity and Genetic Resources Research Programme, WorldFish Center, Penang.
No. 48, Jalan Kemuja, Bangsar Utama 59000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
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