Intensive oyster aquaculture can reduce disease impacts on sympatric wild oysters

T Ben-Horin,Ml Groner,G Bidegain,D Bushek,Da Proestou,Ca Burge,Rb Carnegie,Li Huey

doi:10.3354/aei00290

Abstract

Intensive oyster aquaculture can reduce disease impacts on sympatric wild oysters

Highlights

Disease spread from fish and shellfish farms to sympatric fish and shellfish in the wild is a significant and contentious threat to coastal marine ecosystems
More recent work focused on characterizing and quantifying the response of C. virginica to P. marinus in laboratory-controlled experiments suggests that the susceptibility of oysters to P. marinus infection and survival rates once infected with P. marinus are distinct traits that vary among cultured oysters with different genetic backgrounds (Chintala et al 2002, Ben-Horin et al 2018)
Open-water oyster aquaculture will reduce disease in sympatric populations when cultured populations deter disease agents from infecting hosts in the wild, either by serving as incompetent decoys for parasite stages (Johnson & Thieltges 2010), or, as demonstrated here, when serving as hosts themselves so long as they are harvested before disease peaks

Summary

Introduction

Disease spread from fish and shellfish farms to sympatric fish and shellfish in the wild is a significant and contentious threat to coastal marine ecosystems Disease controls on abundance, combined with the expansion of the USA oyster aquaculture industry in the wake of wild fishery declines (Knapp & Rubino 2016), have since caused wild oysters to be outnumbered by their cultured conspecifics across much of this range Beyond their commercial appeal, aquaculture, and, more recently, restoration activities have been employed to supplement the ecological services provided by wild oyster reefs, including the removal of nutrients and organic material from the water column through the suspension feeding of oysters (Coen et al 2007, Beck et al 2011, Grabowski et al 2012, Dillon et al 2015, Humphries et al 2016). With evidence accumulating that oysters in culture remove phytoplankton and organic material from the water at rates comparable to wild populations (Dillon et al 2015, Humphries et al 2016), this raises the novel hypothesis that cultured oysters, if harvested before disease peaks, can reduce P. marinus concentrations in the water column and alleviate the impact of dermo disease on sympatric wild populations

Methods

Results

Conclusion