A Review of Food and Feeding Habits, Reproductive Biology of Osteobrama cotio (Hamilton, 1822)

Osteobrama cotio of the family Cyprinidae is known as minnows, a tropical, benthopelagic, freshwater species (Baensch and Riehl, 1995). Once they matured occur in ditches, lakes, ponds, rivers, and possibly useful as larvicide (Menon, 1999; Talwar and Jhingran, 1991). In India a total of 9 species of the genus Osteobrama is available, 4 are native and 5 are endemic (Talwar and Jhingran, 1991; Froese and Pauly, 2020). Out of the nine species, Osteobrama belangeri are extinct in the wild (Vishwanath, 2010) whereas O. neilli are no longer found in the type locality due to rapid sampling (Ali and Raghavan, 2011). Being a small indigenous fish, it provides nutritional supplements to a large section of economically backward populations. Osteobrama cotio is one of the prime nutrient-rich small indigenous fishes that contain about 31 mg dehydroretinol, and 22 mg retinol per 100 mg fresh edible tissue within a 2.7 to 3.0 g of fish (Zafri and Ahmed, 1981). The fish are mainly consumed in fresh conditions in the rural areas adjacent to the riverine sides where the fish being caught of the Brahmaputra, Barak, and lower stretches of river Teesta (Kumar and Goswami, 2013).