Aquaculture America 2024

February 18 - 21, 2024

San Antonio, Texas

GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND DISTRIBUTIONAL POTENTIAL OF TWO OYSTER AQUACULTURE PESTS: OSHV-1 AND Perkinsus marinus

Peterson, A. Townsend* , Claudia Nuñez-Penichet, Christine Ellis

Biodiversity Institute

University of Kansas

Lawrence, Kansas 66045 USA

 





Oyster aquaculture is an expensive enterprise that requires considerable infrastructure and investment. As such, infection by pathogens and pests can have important economic consequences. Part of the challenge of avoiding such infections and mitigating their effects is a function of biosecurity and local-scale infection control . However, another important dimension may be awareness of the global-scale distributional potential of the pathogens and pests. This aspect of oyster aquaculture remains largely unaddressed. We assembled testing data from oyster aquaculture initiatives around the world and tested for environmental bias in the distribution of positive test results in assays for OSHV-1 and Perkinsus marinus among the distribution of all tests conducted. A universal result confirmed that an ecological niche of the pathogens exists that is distinct from that of oysters. We then explored the implications of these niche dimensions for the geographic distributional potential worldwide with intriguing and suggestive indications of distributional limitation for each of the two pathogens. We are now improving these models by (1) incorporating additional testing data, (2) adding data reflecting environmental conditions on adjacent terrestrial areas, and (3) making the environmental data specific to the time of testing rather than longer-term averages. Such broad-scale ecological and geographic studies can complement the local-scale biosecurity measures that are currently in place.