Ruihong Snakehead

Ruihong Snakehead

　　Ruihong Snakehead is a specialty of Ruihong Town, Yugan County, Shangrao City, Jiangxi Province. The snakehead from Ruihong Town has few bones, high meat yield, rich nutrition, and is known for removing blood stasis, promoting regeneration, nourishing and conditioning the body, healing wounds, enriching blood, and aiding in wound recovery.

　　The snakehead belongs to the order Perciformes and family Channidae, and is a large, fast-growing, and highly valuable freshwater fish among the Channidae species. It has few bones, high meat yield, rich nutrition, and is known for removing blood stasis, promoting regeneration, nourishing and conditioning the body, healing wounds, enriching blood, and aiding in wound recovery. As a result, the snakehead is very popular in Southeast Asian countries, coastal regions, as well as in the markets of Hong Kong and Macau.

　　The Ruihong Snakehead Aquaculture Base in Yugan County is located on the southeastern shore of Poyang Lake, at the mouth where the Xin River flows into the lake. Currently, the base has become the largest snakehead aquaculture base in China and a provincial-level pollution-free aquatic product farming base in Jiangxi Province. The "Bowelang Brand" Poyang Lake Snakehead produced here has also applied for a "green label."

　　The snakehead aquaculture base in Zhenjiao Village, on the outskirts of Ruihong Town, Yugan County, mainly transforms low-lying fields into ponds and adopts intensive small-water-body farming. Each pond holds over 300 square meters of water surface, with a depth of more than 150 cm, and 10–15 cm of silt at the bottom. The surroundings of the ponds are quiet, with convenient drainage and irrigation. Before stocking fish, the ponds are completely drained and disinfected with quicklime. Water is then introduced and fish are released after 15 days. Fish fry are stocked between February and March each year, with individual sizes of 50–80 g per fish. The fry must be healthy, disease-free, and injury-free, with a stocking density of 5–6 fish per square meter. The sizes of fish in the same pond should be relatively uniform. When releasing the fry, they are disinfected with 0.2–0.5 g/m³ of malachite green or 2%–3% saline solution. The snakehead is a carnivorous fish.

　　The Ruihong Town Zhenjiao Village snakehead aquaculture base mostly feeds the fish with live bait such as small fish and shrimp from Poyang Lake. Feeding is done 2–3 times a day at fixed times and quantities. If there is a shortage of fish or shrimp, other animal by-products such as livestock and poultry offal can also be used, with extra attention paid to freshness and cleanliness. The feed must be chopped and disinfected before feeding. Artificial compound feed can also be prepared according to the nutritional needs of the snakehead to supplement the lack of live bait. Starting from June each year, the fish are netted once a month to gradually market or transfer larger-sized snakeheads to separate ponds, ensuring uniform size within the pond. By late December, the ponds are drained to harvest the fish. Any commercially sized fish that cannot be sold immediately are kept in centralized temporary holding areas for sale during the Spring Festival or later.