Hi everyone, to introduce again, I'm Nghia, an MSc student at the University of Stirling. I am now in Vietnam for my final dissertation project, "Fish Health Status and Cost-Benefit Analysis of Live-Holding Systems in Vietnamese Markets."
I have been in Vietnam since June and almost completed my project. In this article, I will give you details about my project. As the name suggested, this project focused on two ideas: the fish health status and cost-benefit analysis of three (3) species: Catfish (P. conchophilus), tilapia (Oreochromis sp.), and common carp (Cyprinus carpio) at live-holding systems in Vietnamese wet markets, in two regions with one represent city per area: Long Xuyen City- An Giang in the South, and Ha Noi in the North.
The results of this project will aim to understand the practices of maintaining the live-holding systems, which are correlated with fish health and cost-benefit. We aim to better understand what practices are best for the fish (best welfare) and best for the seller (best revenue).
In general, fish health was scored by the published Operational Welfare Indicators (OWIs) (Compassion in World Farming; Pedrazzani et al., 2020; Padrazzani et al., 2022). We used a survey to get the data for maintaining practices and cost-benefit analysis. The two sets of data were collected at the same time and in two stages in the south and north of Vietnam.
I talk more about my work in the following two videos.
This video was filmed before I returned to Vietnam for the project. As you might have noticed, there were some amendments to the project. Which were:
We removed the examination of the water cortisol level. We chose to do this due to the lack of chemicals in the Vietnamese market and the time constraint.
The cost-benefit analysis changed from doing a case study in one market to at least one vendor per market (based on the number of vendors) and at least three markets per city.
Fish species changed from Striped Catfish (Pangasinanodon hypophthalmus) to Cá Hú, or we called it Catfish in this study (P. conchophilus). This was due to the size of the Striped Catfish in An Giang, which was about 4-5kg per fish, and there were not many vendors selling this species or more than 5 fish of this species. Catfish was chosen because it was sold in smaller sizes, most vendors carried the species and more than 5 fish per species per day.
This second video was filmed during my presentation about the project in Can Tho, Vietnam. It was part of the Fish Welfare Workshop, organised by the University of Stirling and Fishery College, Can Tho University. I also presented some initial findings of the fish health status of red-hybrid tilapia in Long Xuyen.
Thank you for reading and watching the videos until the end. I hope this will help you understand more about one of the funded projects. If you have any recommendations or comments and want to discuss them, please feel free to contact me at ndp00009@students.stir.ac.uk.