Diseases in Aquaculture

The rapidly growing food sector of aquaculture is facing many fish diseases and disease outbreak challenges. Aquaculture may face disease infections due to different pathogenic and nonpathogenic causes. Disease outbreaks are well known to result in manifested economic losses. Disease conditions vary from pathogenic to nonpathogenic. Pathogenic conditions include bacterial, viral, fungal, and parasitic. While nonpathogenic include environmental and nutritional. Among nonpathogenic causes comes the overdensities that render aquatic animals more susceptible to infection and predispose them to the occurrence of various diseases conditions including pathogenic diseases. From the pattern of mortality occurrence, we can identify the causative disease conditions. The intermittent course of mortalities may refer to a pathogenic condition, sudden mortalities may be due to toxins, uprising pattern could be related to nutritional conditions, and morning mortalities are mostly suggested to be related to oxygen content. Therefore, developing aquatic animals’ immunity that involves specific and nonspecific immune responses is crucial to prevent those challenging conditions rather than searching for a cure. In this chapter, we will review different diseases of economic importance and their impacts on the aquaculture industry.