Harmful aquatic diseases have had a destructive impact on Aotearoa New Zealand’s marine and freshwater animals and plants in the past and represent a significant ongoing risk. This problem is rapidly escalating under climate change – the rate of aquatic disease investigations in Aotearoa New Zealand doubled in the past five years, and most of these diseases take years to diagnose or a cause is never identified, undermining management efforts.
This Programme will overcome some of the long-standing challenges of aquatic disease diagnosis. We will draw upon medical frameworks to develop and implement a new ‘forensic approach’ for investigating aquatic disease that will enable reliable and timely diagnosis.
We will specifically focus on three key steps in the diagnostic process that will enable us to predict emerging disease trends, improve incident reporting, improve our ability to identify a short-list of suspects early on in the diagnostic process, and better understand the factors that might be causing aquatic disease outbreaks.
Our research will focus on taonga taxa that are unique to Aotearoa New Zealand and will unite leading scientific expertise in aquatic animal health, biosecurity, microbiology (bacteriology, parasitology, and virology), genomics, cell culture, aquatic animal husbandry, histopathology, and social science alongside mana whenua and government stakeholders.
This new approach to aquatic disease investigation will build national resilience against aquatic disease by improving the accuracy and speed of our efforts to diagnose the disease and respond to it. This ultimately protects our precious aquatic ecosystems, preserves their cultural and social value and safeguards our >$3B fisheries and aquaculture industries.
