Development of Fish Health Indicators for the Gladstone Harbour Report Card

Funded Activity Summary

This application answers a request for Expressions of Interest for an FRDC and GHHP project to develop a fish sampling program and fish health indicators for the Gladstone Harbour Report Card. The project will review and test approaches, drawing on earlier work commissioned by GHHP (Cowled, 2016; Kroon et al., 2016).

Fish are key biological indicators of environmental contamination, as they are continuously exposed, ubiquitous in aquatic ecosystems, and play an important ecological role (van der Oost et al., 2003). When employing fish as indicators of ecosystem health, most Australian programs consider assemblages and community structure. This approach is well-tested and simple to deploy. Its limitations are that extensive sampling can be required to ensure the monitoring program is spatially and temporally representative, avoids sampling gear bias and guarantees sufficient statistical power to detect change. The alternative approach is to measure indicators of individual fish health, such as morphometry, gross pathology, histopathology (Mishra and Mohanty, 2009), fish parasite load and diversity (Sasal et al., 2007) or chromosomal mutations (Pak et al., 2012). Other measures, such as bioaccumulation of contaminants, do not necessarily indicate poor fish health but can be useful for assessing ecosystem condition. Fish health indicators range from relatively low cost to high cost and complexity.

For this project, the preference is for testing and development of low-medium categories of indicators such as external examination, morphometry, gross pathology, parasite count and application of the health assessment index (Cowled, 2016). We will review suitable fish monitoring methods, develop and test cost-effective data collection approaches for Gladstone Harbour using adaptive sampling, evaluate the potential to transfer methods and indicators to similar areas, and produce fish indicators for inclusion in the 2017-18 Gladstone Harbour Report Card.

Future monitoring costs for 2019 are estimated at $45,324 (ex GST), not included in the budget.


Objectives:
1. To review and identify suitable methods to monitor fish health in the Gladstone Harbour.
2. To develop and implement a data collection approach by the end of June 2018 to monitor fish health in the Gladstone Harbour that is both cost-effective and suitable for a fish health indicator.
3. To evaluate the potential to adapt and transfer the methods and indicators developed to monitor fish health in other estuaries and ports in Northern Australia.
4. To develop fish health indicator(s) based on the data collected and apply them to the 2017-18 Gladstone Harbour Report Card.

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 20-12-2017

End Date: 20-12-2018

Funding Scheme: Funding Scheme not available

Funding Amount: $156,370.69

Funder: Fisheries Research and Development Corporation

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

There are no FoR codes available for this funding activity

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

There are no SEO codes available for this funding activity

Other Keywords

Animal Health | Behaviour | Contamination | Data | Health Benefits | Innovation | Water quality

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