Abstract
Aquatic diseases can have serious impacts on global biodiversity, economies, and societies.Understanding the cause of emerging aquatic diseases is a scientific challenge and governmental priority to reduce impacts and inform discovery of new treatments and management methods.We propose a holistic approach leveraging medical criteria and traditional and modern technologies to demonstrate causal factors associated with emerging diseases of aquatic organisms.Technological developments can increasingly enable disease emergence forecasting, high-throughput screening to rapidly shortlist suspect infectious and noninfectious agents, culture of a broader range of aquatic microorganisms, and challenge trials with whole organisms and surrogate models.
Resolving the cause of disease (= aetiology) in aquatic organisms is a challenging but essential goal, heightened by increasing disease prevalence in a changing climate and an interconnected world of anthropogenic pathogen spread. Emerging diseases play important roles in evolutionary ecology, wildlife conservation, the seafood industry, recreation, cultural practices, and human health. As we emerge from a global pandemic of zoonotic origin, we must focus on timely diagnosis to confirm aetiology and enable response to diseases in aquatic ecosystems. Those systems’ resilience, and our own sustainable use of seafood, depend on it. Synchronising traditional and recent advances in microbiology that span ecological, veterinary, and medical fields will enable definitive assignment of risk factors and causal agents for better biosecurity management and healthier aquatic ecosystems.