Research Highlights - Fish Health

Aquaculture/Fisheries Center Research Highlights

Fish Health

Fish Health
Andy Goodwin

The UAPB Fish Disease Laboratories have been working with industry to establish a program to ensure the disease status of farm raised baitfish. This program protects the industry from disease losses and provides a market advantage for farmers by allowing them to prove the superiority and safety of their farm raised product. In 2005, the Arkansas State Legislature enacted a new law that will use this program as part of a new Bait and Ornamental Fish Farm Certification process that will be backed by the State Department of Agriculture. Any Goodwin and Nathan Stone are working with industry and with the Department of Agriculture to write the regulations for this new effort.

The UAPB Fish Disease Laboratory has developed a new diagnostic assay for goldfish herpes virus and used that assay to demonstrate that the virus is an important pathogen that has resulted in fish losses in California, Ohio, and Delaware. This new assay has recently been published and is now in use in fish disease laboratories in at least 3 other countries.

Assays done at the UAPB Fish Disease Laboratory have shown that the effectiveness of widely used expensive proprietary liquid copper formulations is no greater than that of inexpensive copper sulfate. These findings show that farmers using liquid formulations can cut their treatment costs by 95%.

In recent years we have shown that Golden Shiner Virus is actually Chinese Grass Carp Reovirus. Work done this year has demonstrated the presence of this pathogen in wild fish populations and has added two more host species to the list of fish susceptible to infection by the virus.