THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO THANK the Fisheries Department of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations for suggesting and sponsoring the preparation of this manual. My personal thanks go to all those who provided information on modern culture techniques during the preparation of a recent book, whose contributions were acknowledged earlier (New and Valenti 2000). The existence of this book helped me prepare the current manual and I am grateful to Blackwell Science for allowing me to reproduce some of its illustrations.
Many friends and colleagues kindly reviewed parts of the manual, namely Claude Boyd (Chapter 2), Eudes Correia (Chapter 4), Lou D’Abramo (Table 19), Bill Daniels (Chapter 3 and parts of Chapter 4), Jean Dhont and Chris Dinneweth (Part of Section 4.2 and Annex 4), Deborah Ismael (Chapter 1), Ken Johnson (Parts of Sections 4.2 and 6.4), Ilan Karplus (Annex 8), Hassanai Kongkeo (Chapter 6), Spencer Malecha (Annex 8), James Muir (Chapter 2), Harold Phillips (Chapters 7 and 8), Patrick Sorgeloos (Part of Section 4.2 and Annex 4), James Tidwell (Part of Section 6.2), Wagner Valenti (Chapters 4, 5 and 6) and Sergio Zimmermann (Part of Section 6.2). I am grateful to Joanne Morgante, who was responsible for the final layout and production stages of the publication, and Emanuela D’Antoni, who was responsible for the artwork. Special thanks also go to the many colleagues who provided photographs specifically for this manual, whose names appear beneath the relevant illustrations. I would like to extend my gratitude to the FAO staff who contributed specific ideas, comments and other inputs to this manual; these included Jiansan Jia, Devin Bartley, Rohana Subasinghe, Erhard Ruckes, Ulf Wijkstrom, Jean Collins, Adele Crispoldi-Hotta, Mairi Page and Rine Sola.
Finally, I wish to thank three friends who have influenced my work with Macrobrachium. The first is Somsak Singholka who was my colleague in Thailand in 1979-1981: he co-authored the original FAO manual with me and has remained a close friend ever since. Secondly, I much appreciate the help of Mario Pedini, who stimulated the production of the original manual: his meticulous review considerably improved the draft. Finally, I owe continuing gratitude to the late Takuji Fujimura, a pioneer of freshwater prawn farming, who taught me and many others so much. I have reproduced Fuji’s beauti ful photographs of the larval stages of Macrobrachium rosenbergii again in this new ma nual.