O. mossambicus has slow growth rates, and it matures at a small size, leading to overcrowding of fishponds with small fish. Moreover, O. mossambicus became widely established in the Asia and Pacific region as an alien, invasive, and sometimes problematic species in natural waters and in fishponds used to farm shrimp and milkfish. Consequently, tilapia farming in Asia failed to develop until the Nile tilapia (O. niloticus), a faster growing and more manageable species than O. mossambicus, was introduced from Africa in the 1960s. During the 1960s, most farmed populations of Nile tilapia in Asia were descendants of a single introduction from Egypt to Japan in 1962. Thereafter, up to the early 1980s, there were occasional introductions from Israel, mainly to Southeast Asia, of farmed Nile tilapia strains that had originated in Ghana and Uganda.