Meeting Abstract
Over the last two decades disease outbreaks have been increasingly reported from several commercially important crustacean fisheries. Environmental stressors, including increasing temperatures, extensive hypoxia due to eutrophication, and presumptive exposures to contaminants, have been implicated as contributory factors in these outbreaks. Environmental stressors can alter the homoestasis of crustacean hosts by weakening or compromising their defensive responses thereby increasing their susceptibility to pathogens. Such stressors also favor microbial pathogens by improving their reproductive capacity, particularly in response to temperature or nutrient loading, leading to faster rates of population growth that can overwhelm host defensive capabilities. The role of environmental stressors in the emergence of pathogens has been hard to delineate because stressors have complex biotic and abiotic interactions making them difficult to isolate and identify using classical field and laboratory techniques. This review highlights the role of increasing temperature due to climate change in the emergence of several syndromes and provides insights into how multiple factors contribute to the emergence of outbreaks in in several crustacean host- pathogen systems. Examples include outbreaks of epizootic shell disease, Neoparamoeba pemaquidensis, calcinosis and blindness in clawed lobsters, Hematodinium in snow crabs and blue crabs, and viral infections in shrimp and spiny lobsters. Collaborative studies offer a means to coordinate sampling and focus research questions to gain further understanding of causality and the environmental factors that contribute to the emergence of diseases.
