Prior to 2006, the predominant method for culturing snakehead in Vietnam and Cambodia was to collect wild juveniles from natural sources like the Mekong River and Tonle Sap.  Particularly in Cambodia, aquaculture farmers, who were also fishermen, would collect their own fingerling snakehead.  They would then also collect “small fish”, also known as low-value fish or trash fish, from natural sources, chop them up and feed them to the snakehead in culture.  A conflict existed between users of these fish: the aquaculture/fishing people and the remainder of the Cambodian population who relied on small fish (Fig. 1) for a variety of products including fish sauce, prahoc, etc that provided protein to the Cambodian people throughout the year.  As a result, and to protect the nutrition of the Cambodian population, aquaculture of snakehead was banned in Cambodia beginning in 2004. Snakehead culture continued in Vietnam.  Wild fingerlings were collected from the Mekong, but anecdotal reports indicated that wild fish could never be induced to eat pellet feed; farmers continued to rely on chopped-up small fish that were also collected from the wild.  Efforts had already been made beginning in the late 1990’s to develop hatcheries to domesticate snakehead for a steady supply of fingerlings that did not rely on natural sources. Although common breeding techniques from around the world could be utilized to induce spawning, larval rearing practices relied on use of live feed (the cladoceran Moina spp.) followed by chopped small fish as a weaning diet.  Grow-out production continued to rely on chopped small fish.  Concerns mounted that harvesting small fish from the Mekong River for an expanding snakehead aquaculture industry would eventually lead to detrimental impacts on those populations of small fish. In 2007, the U.S. Agency for International Development-funded Aquafish Collaborative Research Support Program, later re-named the Aquafish Innovation Lab, funded a project to address the issues of sustainability in snakehead culture in Vietnam and Cambodia. A major aspect of the project was the development of diets and feeding strategies that would obviate the need for small fish usage in snakehead culture.  This occurred in a series of steps, as follows.