Macrobrachium vollenhovenii is the largest and the main candidate for fisheries and aquaculture of indigenous freshwater prawn in Africa. Though many reports have shown a progressive decline in the wild stock of this species, its culture technique is still under research. This work was to remature wild broodstock of M. vollenhovenii in captivity using four different feeds in view to evaluate their reproductive performance and offspring quality.
Experiment was conducted in two phases. In phase one, spent broodstock of M. vollenhovenii fed experimental diets: commercial maturation feed (control, T0), maggot (T1), fresh mackerel (T2) and locally formulated feed (T3) and their reproductive performances were evaluated. In phase two their offspring quality in a recirculation system with three replicates per treatment (TL0, TL1, TL2 and TL3) were evaluated for 30 days.
The duration of the gonadal development was significantly different among all the treatments, respectively 28.67 ± 0.58 days and 16.33 ± 1.15 days for T0 and T1 (Table 1) . T1 recorded the best GSI (16.08 ± 0.2%). The number of larvae per gram female was significantly different between T0 and other treatments, with T0 recording the least value (519 ± 77 larvae g−1 female). Larval development in TL1 and TL3 were significantly faster than TL0 and TL2. However, survival rate was the best in TL3 (32.17 ± 0.57%) followed by TL0 (29.63 ± 0.33%). The results of this study are evidence of the possibility of successfully re-maturing and breeding this prawn in captivity.