If you think of a better fish pun. Let minnow.

source: http://www.jokes4us.com/animaljokes/fishjokes.html

Please click on the link below to help me choose the best T-shirt design that will bring greatest awareness of our profession as aquatic veterinarians.

https://99designs.com.au/t-shirt-design/vote-uyo3xn

The voters who chose the winning design will be put into ballot to win TheFishVet’s Powder Gel, valued at AU$56.95. See how it’s used here – http://youtu.be/GHJtZRrx8IU

So I can contact you to send the prize, please write your email address in the COMMENTS box when casting your vote.

Only one vote per person.

Thank you.

Follow me on: Facebook "Fin Page" – YouTube – Blog – Linkedin – Twitter

—
Yours sincerely,

Dr Richmond Loh DipProjMgt, BSc, BVMS, MPhil (Pathology) Murdoch, MANZCVS (Aquatics & Pathobiology), CertAqV.
Veterinarian | Adjunct Lecturer Murdoch University | President-elect WAVMA |
Secretary Aquatic Animal Health Chapter – ANZCVS.
The Fish Vet, Perth, Western Australia, AUSTRALIA. Mobile Veterinary Medical & Diagnostic Services for fish and other aquatic creatures.
http://www.thefishvet.com.au
Ph: +61 (0)421 822 383

Looking for more books? Check out this site.

I need your help.

Vote on my top designs and help me pick a winner

I am in the process of running a t-shirt design contest on 99designs and have created a poll with the best designs I’ve received. Now, I need your help to choose a winning t-shirt design. Simply click on the link below and give each of the designs a star rating out of 5. It will only take a couple of minutes to complete.

Follow me on: Facebook “Fin Page” – YouTube  – Blog – Linkedin – Twitter—
Yours sincerely,

Dr Richmond Loh

DipProjMgt, BSc, BVMS, MPhil (Pathology) Murdoch, MANZCVS (Aquatics & Pathobiology), CertAqV.
Veterinarian | Adjunct Lecturer Murdoch University | President-elect WAVMA |
Secretary Aquatic Animal Health Chapter – ANZCVS.
The Fish Vet, Perth, Western Australia, AUSTRALIA.

Mobile Veterinary Medical & Diagnostic Services for fish and other aquatic creatures.
http://www.thefishvet.com.au
Ph: +61 (0)421 822 383Looking for more books? Check out this site.

 

This is a thumbs up for Australian aquaculture!

Read more here

This would have great applications across aquacultured and ornamental pet fishes where eradication is not always possible for reasons as being in an extensive culture situation or where you are rearing fish in open water situations. Worth a look into.

Garlic is used as an appetite stimulant and has immunostimulatory properties too. Just need to add at quantities depending on species and what it’s for.

… and in the movies, it’ll keep away vampires! Which can be thought of as blood sucking parasites!

Aquaculture
Volume 409, Number 1-2 (September 2013)
	Dietary supplementation of garlic (Allium sativum) to prevent monogenean infection in aquaculture
	Authors:	Thane A. Militz, Paul C. Southgate, Alexander G. Carton, Kate S. Hutson
	Author Affiliations:	no affiliations available
	Source:	Aquaculture, Volume 409, Number 1-2 (September 2013)
	Page Numbers:	95 – 99
	Available Full Text:	Full Text: Subscription Required to view full text Format: PDF Size: Unknown Location: Publisher’s Site Authentication: Publisher’s Site
	Abstract:	Development of an effective preventative treatment for managing infections by Monogenea (Platyhelminthes) in aquaculture remains elusive. Present treatment methods offer only temporary respite and are either labor intensive, harmful to fish welfare or environmentally destructive. This study used garlic (Allium sativum) supplemented feed to assess its potential, in relation to its allicin content (an active component of garlic), to prevent infection by Neobenedeniasp. (Monogenea: Capsalidae) on farmed barramundi, Lates calcarifer. Two garlic supplemented diets of different concentrations and a non-supplemented control diet were fed to L. calcariferfor 10 and 30days prior to challenging fish with Neobenedeniasp. Long-term (30days) supplementation with garlic significantly reduced infection success by up to 70% compared to controls and did not negatively affect palatability of the feed. Infection success was not influenced by short-term (10days) supplementation suggesting that a delayed host response must occur to improve resistance to infection. Incorporation of garlic into a pressure-extruded pellet was found to be an effective method of delivery as only minimal leaching of allicin from the diet occurred (<3% of allicin detected) during the interval of water contact between delivery and consumption. This study demonstrates that garlic extract administered as a dietary supplement is one of the most practical methods to prevent Neobenedeniasp. infection in mariculture.
	Citation:	Thane A. Militz, Paul C. Southgate, Alexander G. Carton, Kate S. Hutson . Dietary supplementation of garlic (Allium sativum) to prevent monogenean infection in aquaculture. Aquaculture, Volume 409, Numbers 1-2 (September 2013), pp. 95-99, <http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=4B6A87E8530AFD9EB166&gt;
	URL:	http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=4B6A87E8530AFD9EB166

Going through veterinary school, there was always rivalry between the medical students and the veterinary students. You might be familiar with the bumper sticker, “Real doctors treat more than one species.”

The animals that line up in a row under that banner include the traditional dog, cat, horse, cow, sheep, pig and maybe rabbit and mouse.

Now as an aquatic veterinarian, I’m taking that further. “Aquatic Veterinarians treat more than one Phyla!”

The Phyla I’d like to be represented include:

• Coelenterates (e.g. coral, jellyfish, anemone),
• Arthropods (e.g. crab, prawn, lobster),
• Echinoderm (e.g. starfish, sea cucumber),
• Mollusc (e.g. abalone, octopus, cuttlefish, oyster),
• Vertebrates (e.g. Fish, Amphibia, Reptiles [crocodile, turtles, sea snake] and Marine mammals [dolphin, orca]).

Perhaps for the aquatic animals, we might even need to have 2-3 lines of animal pictures!

Check out the idea for my design here and feel free to contribute by design and vote if you can –
99designs.com.au/t-shirt-design/contests/t-shirt-design-required-251104/brief

The audience for the T-shirt design is aquatic veterinarians; for us to wear, to help increase awareness within our veterinary profession and to the outside world.

—
Yours sincerely,

Dr Richmond Loh
DipProjMgt, BSc, BVMS, MPhil (Pathology) Murdoch, MANZCVS (Aquatics& Pathobiology), Cert AqV.
The Fish Vet, Perth, Western Australia.
Veterinary Medicine for fish.
W: http://www.thefishvet.com.au
E: thefishvet
P: +61 (0)421 822 383

It seems that molecular techniques (PCR) are over taking the traditional methods for making diagnoses. It can be much more sensitive and have a much quicker turn around time. But, as a trained veterinary pathologist, I would tread with caution. The technique detailed below talks about how they used it to identify Mycobacteria in CLINICAL CASES. This means that they already knew they had the bug and was just testing for the fact. I have no qualms about using PCR to confirm a diagnosis because we regularly use multiple lines of evidence to arrive at our conclusions. But to use it as the sole means to make a diagnosis can be very dangerous.

Recently I’ve had a case where two animals in the collection was destroyed based on PCR detection of the pathogen. A full necropsy and thorough histopathology examination actually showed the animals had a clean bill of health! How could it have gone so wrong? This is because PCR tests only needs to detect a small portion of the DNA of the bug to give a positive result. So here are two simplified scenarios. The first is that the living bug is not present, but only components of the bug is present which is detected by the test. The second scenario is that the bug may be present in whole, but it may not be causing disease. It’s only an incidental findings.

There’s much to be said about studying the whole animal rather than relying on a test on alphabet soup!

The other great advantage of histopathology is that you can spot many other things that might be going on in the animal.

Aquaculture
Volume 411, Number 1-2 (October 2013)
	Use of restriction enzyme fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) of the 16S–23S rRNA internal transcribed spacer region (ITS) for identification of fish mycobacteria
	Authors:	Fazel Pourahmad, Randolph H. Richards
	Author Affiliations:	no affiliations available
	Source:	Aquaculture, Volume 411, Number 1-2 (October 2013)
	Page Numbers:	184 – 189
	Available Full Text:	Full Text: Subscription Required to view full text Format: PDF Size: Unknown Location: Publisher’s Site Authentication: Publisher’s Site
	Abstract:	PCR targeting the 16S–23S rRNA gene internally transcribed spacer (ITS) region has been proposed as a rapid and reliable method for the detection of Mycobacteriumspecies in human clinical specimens. Because of variation in ITS sequences amongst Mycobacteriumspecies, a single PCR amplification can be used to differentiate slowly growing and rapidly growing species within this genus. In the present study, analysis by ITS-PCR and ITS-restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) was found to be a useful, simple and rapid method compared to current molecular and phenotypic techniques. The ITS was amplified from 13 reference strains and 59 fish isolated mycobacteria using a set of published PCR primers. After PCR, the banding patterns generated allowed slowly growing mycobacteria to be differentiated from all other rapidly growing species, with the exception of Mycobacterium conceptionense. HaeIII was selected as one of two restriction enzymes that, together with the knowledge about amplicon sizes, would produce an acceptable level of discrimination in the resulting RLFP patterns, especially in the rapidly growing group of mycobacteria. After digestion with Sau96I, the amplified products of most isolates of Mycobacterium fortuitum, including subtypes II and V and those 2 isolates with new patterns (220, 100bp), presented identical or very similar patterns as obtained by HaeIII digestion. All isolates of Mycobacterium marinum, Mycobacterium chelonaeand Mycobacterium gordonae, whose PCR products were not digested with HaeIII, produced two well-defined fragments with the Sau96I restriction enzyme.
	Citation:	Fazel Pourahmad, Randolph H. Richards . Use of restriction enzyme fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) of the 16S–23S rRNA internal transcribed spacer region (ITS) for identification of fish mycobacteria. Aquaculture, Volume 411, Numbers 1-2 (October 2013), pp. 184-189, <http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=483BA7BA8D76F091EC97&gt;
	URL:	http://ejournals.ebsco.com/direct.asp?ArticleID=483BA7BA8D76F091EC97

Be careful what you eat!  see below:

PARALYTIC SHELLFISH POISONING – AUSTRALIA: (WESTERN AUSTRALIA) ALERT

********************************************************************

A ProMED-mail post

<http://www.promedmail.org>

ProMED-mail is a program of the

International Society for Infectious Diseases <http://www.isid.org>

Date: Wed 18 Sep 2013

Source: In My Community, Mandurah Coastal Times report [edited] <http://www.inmycommunity.com.au/news-and-views/local-news/High-algae-levels-prompt-estuary-shellfish-warning/7650575/>

High levels of potentially toxic microscopic algae have been recorded in shellfish in South Yunderup [Western Australia] in recent testing.

The Shire of Murray is urging residents and visitors to avoid eating all wild shellfish from the Peel-Harvey Estuary.

Filter feeding shellfish absorb the algae, which are capable of producing toxins.

*****Cooking cannot destroy the toxins and the shellfish could cause poisoning if consumed.

Symptoms of shellfish poisoning include nausea, cramping, vomiting, and diarrhoea.

“The Shire continues to work closely with the Department of Water and Health to monitor algae levels in the estuary,” chief executive Dean Unsworth said.

Anyone who has consumed shellfish from these waters and experiences poisoning symptoms should seek medical attention.

Wild shellfish from inland water sources should not be eaten, as water quality and safe consumption can not be guaranteed. These species include oysters, mussels, clams, pipis, scallops, cockles, and razor clams.

Shellfish purchased in supermarkets are not affected as these products must adhere to food quality assurance programs to ensure they are safe for consumption.

For more information contact the Shire of Murray on 9531 7777 or visit the Department of Health website for further details regarding wild shellfish collection.

[Byline: Rachel Fenner]

—

Communicated by:

ProMED-mail from HealthMap Alerts

<promed@promedmail.org>

[Paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) is a public health risk worldwide, resulting from the consumption of seafood that has bioaccumulated toxins produced by microalgae. Bivalve shellfish (such as mussels, clams, oysters, and scallops) pose a particularly high risk as they feed by filtration, providing a method of toxin accumulation. Algae responsible for causing PSP include several species of the genus _Alexandrium_, _Pyrodinium bahamense_ and _Gymnodinium catenatum_. Paralytic shellfish toxins (PST) have been recorded in shellfish from Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales, and Tasmania.

PSP is often caused by several closely related species in the genus _Alexandrium_. PSP toxins are responsible for persistent problems due to their accumulation in filter feeding shellfish, but they also move through the food chain, affecting zooplankton, fish larvae, adult fish, and even birds and marine mammals.

It is likely that seasonally recurring outbreaks of PSP are linked to the existence of a dormant cyst stage in the _Alexandrium_ life history. This strategy allows the species to deposit dormant cells in sediments where they survive through harsh winter conditions and then germinate to initiate new outbreaks in subsequent years. Long-term climatic variability, which affects temperature, upwelling, and currents, or allows cysts to survive in areas where they did not before, may be factors in extensions.

Shellfish that have caused this disease include mussels, cockles, clams, scallops, oysters, crabs, and lobsters. Symptoms begin anywhere from 15 minutes to 10 hours after eating the contaminated shellfish, although usually within 2 hours. Symptoms are generally mild, and begin with numbness or tingling of the face, arms, and legs. This is followed by headache, dizziness, nausea, and muscular incoordination.

Patients sometimes describe a floating sensation. In cases of severe poisoning, muscle paralysis and respiratory failure occur, and in these cases death may occur in 2 to 25 hours.

Reference

———

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Marine Biotoxins. Food and Nutrition Paper 80; 2004.

Portions of this comment have been extracted from <http://aquaticpath.umd.edu/toxalg/psp.html> and from <https://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/Publishing.nsf/Content/cdi3701e>.

Maps of Australia can be seen at

<http://www.ga.gov.au/image_cache/GA4073.jpg> and <http://healthmap.org/r/8txX>. Peel-Harvey Estuary is located 80 km

(49.7 mi) south of Perth in Western Australia. – Mod.TG

Photos of pipis (_Paphies australis_): <http://tinyurl.com/oo2eoyv>. – Mod.JW]

Q: What did one clown fish say to the other?

A: “Keep your friends close.
Keep your anemones closer.”

Pictured below are the bony structures of the Synodontis catfish. Checkout the long bony first ray of the dorsal fin. It’s like a lance and can penetrate any soft tissue readily.

Checkout the serrated first ray of the pectoral fins! Looks like a spear that only goes in one direction!

All these bony structures can be locked in place and provides the gentle fish a defence mechanism. This is the reason many predators leave them well alone; and this is why we must take care when handling them.