Kenneth Cain does his research which primarily focuses on the fish immune system and developing new and improved aquaculture vaccines and other alternative disease management tools/products. This work has provided a greater understanding of the role mucosal immunity and antibody play in mucosal vaccines for fish. Efforts in his laboratory have led to the development of a live attenuated vaccine against Coldwater disease and rainbow trout fry syndrome for use in salmonid aquaculture. This vaccine is under commercial development. Furthermore, his lab has discovered a naturally occurring putative probiotic in the microbiota of rainbow trout capable of reducing mortality when applied to commercial feeds and fed to rainbow trout. These new disease management tools have the potential to provide significant production improvements for aquaculture.

Statement of the Problem: A new nickel with the global population expected to reach 9 billion by the year 2050, aquaculture will continue to expand and provide the majority of seafood products to meet world demand. Current and future expansion must be done in a sustainable and economically viable way. As new aquaculture ventures develop, disease management is often neglected due to a lack of appropriate tools/products to combat new and emerging diseases. There is a strong need for new and better products, but the challenges facing successful development and commercialization of vaccines or other disease control products are immense. Bacterial diseases are the most common problems in marine and freshwater aquaculture and in some cases vaccines are successfully used to prevent or control mortality. However, many operations rely on antibiotics to control diseases. To remain a viable and sustainable industry, alternatives to antibiotics must be further developed. Better vaccines aimed at preventing or limiting disease outbreaks are important, but other alternatives (e.g. functional feeds, probiotics, etc.) are being explored. Two such tools/products will be highlighted and discussed. Our group has developed and patented a live attenuated immersion vaccine that protects fish from bacterial Coldwater disease/rainbow trout fry syndrome (CWD/RTFS). This vaccine has been proven efficacious in fish as small as 0.5 g  and all aspects of this vaccine are currently being optimized for commercialization. Another potential alternative tool to control this disease involves a putative probiotic (Enterobacter C6-6), which was recently discovered and shown to reduce mortality when fed to fish infected with Flavobacterium psychrophilum, the causative agent of CWD/RTFS. Interestingly, the mechanism associated with this bacteria’s ability to inhibit F. psychrophilum in vitro and reduce mortality in rainbow trout in vivo appears to be linked to an antimicrobial peptide. The development, subsequent optimization, and potential path to commercialization of these fish health tools/products will be discussed.

Ernesto A Chavez did his PhD in 1978. He is the Professor of the Marine Sciences Research Centre of the Polytechnic Institute in La Paz, Mexico. His research interests are Bio economic assessment of fisheries by simulation, impact of climate on fisheries, coral reef ecology. He is the teacher of the courses, fisheries simulation, fisheries management and coral reef ecology at the graduate program of his research centre. He has been adviser of 25 MSc thesis B Sc, 16 at the MSc Program and 5 at Ph D level. He has led 17 research projects and has collaborated on another 16. He has published more than 150 scientific papers, including the co-edition of a book on the coral reefs of the south Gulf of Mexico (2007), translated into Spanish (2010).

Within all the problems that society faces, in the context of a population boom and a growing environmental pollution, the future of the fisheries is burdened by the political trends and the ruling economic and social factors. The development of fisheries is in the midst of the need to feed a growing human population and the consequences of the depletion of exploited stocks, motivated by economic interests and constrained by their finite biomass. Economic factors, social factors and the dynamics of fisheries face each other, multiple interacting problems, but they have their own dynamics and complicate the possibility of finding isolated and independent solutions. Aquaculture seems to offer a light of hope for mankind by helping to solve the problem of producing food from the aquatic environment. However, this is not a permanent solution. There are certain trends in fishery development which in practice, may contribute to a future that can help fisheries to become truly sustainable, such as reduction of discharges, gradual reduction of the production of large vessels, improvement of management measures, increased involvement participation of the, eco-labeling of fishery products, reduction of illegal fishing, relative price stability and certification of many fisheries, among others. All these factors open a window of hope that allows us to expect that the sustainability of fishing can become a reality, rather than a utopia. In this, meeting we will be presenting papers with different orientation and I am confident that as a whole, all the participants will contribute to achieve that desired goal.