OPEN ACCESS International Journal of Aquatic Science ISSN: 2008-8019 Vol. 7, No. 2, 58-62, 2016 () leeseongwei@yahoo.com Water hyacinth, Eichhornia crassipes (Mart.), leaf as an Alternative Protein Source for Siamese Gourami, Trichogaster pectoralis Seong Wei Lee 1 , Mat Rani Farid 1 , Wee Wendy 2 and Abdul Kari Zulhisyam 1 1) Faculty of Agro Based Industry, Universiti Malaysia Kelantan Jeli Campus, 17600, Jeli, Kelantan, Malaysia 2) Centre for Fundamental and Liberal Education, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, Kuala Terengganu, 21030, Terengganu, Malaysia Received: December-08-2015 Accepted: February-24-2016 Published: June-25-2016 Abstract: In the present study, water hyacinth, Eichhornia crassipes leaf is attempt to be used as protein source in Siamese Gourami, Trichogaster pectoralis farming. Preliminary study revealed that E. crassipes leaf possess high protein content (12.1±1.81%). Therefore, further study was carried out to evaluate the potential of the plant as alternative protein source for Siamese Gourami farming.There were five treatments based on different percentage of combination of E. crassipes leaf and fish meal namelyT1 (20% of E. crassipes leaf + 80% fish meal), T2 (40% of E. crassipes leaf + 60% fish meal), T3 (60% of E. crassipes leaf + 40% fish meal), T4 (80% of E. crassipes leaf + 20% fish meal) and T5 (100% of E. crassipes leaf) with three replicates for each treatment. The control group of fish was fed with fish meal. The feeding trial is continuing until four weeks and the liver of fish of each treatment is subjected to histology study in order to evaluate the toxicity level of E. crassipes leaf against fish that received treatment. The results of the present study revealed that treatment T1 showed the best performance in term of growth rate and had significance difference (p < 0.05) compared to other groups. Furthermore, T1 treatment performed promising result in palatability and toxicity experiment reflect the huge potential of the plant as protein source in Siamese Gourami farming. Keywords: Trichogaster pectoralis, water hyacinth,Eichhornia crassipes,nutrition Introduction Siamese gourami, Trichogaster pectoralis, is a native freshwater fish in Malaysia. However, this fish can also be found in USA (Courtenay et al., 1984), Brazil (Magalhaes et al., 2002), India (Welcomme, 1988), Indonesia (Kottelat et al., 1993), Thailand (Amornsakun, 2004). The biggest size of Siamese gourami was reported 25 cm in body length and weight 200 g (Froese and Pauly, 2003). Traditionally, Siamese gourami was collected from its natural habitat such as paddy field, ditch, lake and river. Commonly, this fish is highly source out for pickling. Recently, the sudden demand from local market pushing Siamese gourami market price as high as USD 5/kg. In order to fulfil the demand from market, Siamese gourami need to be farmed and not only depend on natural source. In the captivity environment, Siamese gourami was given commercial pellet which increased cost production of the fish. Hence, research was conducted to find the alternative protein source to feed farmed Siamese gourami to reduce production cost. Local ingredient was recognized can be used in formulating low cost fish feed. One of the local ingredient is water hyacinth where can be found widely in local natural water bodies. Water hyacinth, Eichhornia crassipesis known as weed and can be found abundant in the stagnant water bodies (Dipanjan, 2010). The fast growing of this weed create adverse impact to the environment (Dipanjan, 2010). The intense population of the aquatic plant restrict the penetration of sunlight into water body. Subsequently, most of aquatic organisms cannot survive in that environment. However, water hyacinth has been reported widely use as terrestrial and aquatic animal feed as early as 1970s (Sipauba and Braga, 2007). The results from the previous studies indicating application of the plant as feed is promising. Furthermore, preliminary experiment showed water hyacinth was rich of protein ranged from 6 to 12%. Since Siamese gourami was identified as algae/plant eater freshwater fish, in the present study, water hyacinth, E. crassipes, leaf, was used to evaluate its potential as alternative protein source for Siamese gourami farming.