Growth. Most tilapia farmers consider fast growth from seed to harvest size to be the most important performance trait, along with high survival rate. The efficiency with which a fish converts feed to body mass is also an important consideration. However, for the majority of tilapia farming systems prevalent in Asia when the development of GIFT started, growing fish quickly to harvest size, even with ad libitum feeding, was the overriding concern. These farming systems comprised mainly fishponds, fertilized to produce natural plankton as feeds and also supplied with supplemental feed, and cages in which fish were usually supplied with more complete formulated feeds. In these situations, there is sometimes a tendency to overfeed fish in the belief that this will lead to increased harvests. This situation complicates estimation of feed conversion efficiency. Methods for the genetic improvement of feed conversion efficiency in farmed fish were not available when GIFT were developed and are still under development.22
Growth of livestock and some fish species (footnote 14) has been readily improved by selective breeding. However, growth rate is a complex trait to measure, because the growth rates of fish change during their development from juveniles to adults. For the development of GIFT, harvest weight at 90 or 120 days was chosen as the trait to be improved. This was a reasonable choice as an indicator of overall growth rate, given that historical harvest sizes for farmed tilapia in Asia had ranged from about 100 grams (g) to about 350 g, from cropping cycles of up to 9 months.23 After 90 or 120 days, any farmed tilapia would be expected to have a harvest weight indicative of its growth rate during its main phase of growth. These were also convenient periods for experimentation: long enough to show growth differences among tilapia strains and short enough for multiple trials and progress in selection