Ecophysiological Stress Response in Fish and Stress Mitigation: In Support of Food and Environment Sustainability

About this Research Topic

Background

Within the next 30-40 years global food requirements will be between 60-120 million metric tons. Aquaculture is the fastest growing food production industry in the world, and can potentially meet this demand through healthy and high quality food as well as provides a secure income source. Therefore, it is crucial to our food security and economy that the aquaculture production continues to increase annually, but also sustainably. However, fish performance and welfare which determines the production yield are increasingly threatened by waterborne stressors including indiscriminate use of xenobiotics. In addition, the sustainability of the aquaculture sector is at stake due to the predicted effects of climate change. It is understood that fish undergo a cascade of physio-biochemical and metabolic changes following stressful challenges, which are adaptive in nature. Beside, compensatory response employed by fish to alleviate stresses, one of the most promising areas of research is the development of strategies to reduce/combat the stressors during various aquaculture practices.

This Research Topic is aimed at advancing our understanding of the responses of aquatic organisms towards multiple stressors induced by anthropogenic activities as well as climate change - encompassing temperature shock, dissolved oxygen depletion, nitrogen pollution, heavy metals, pesticides, feed limitation, elevated CO₂, diseases and harmful algal bloom etc. This will also assist to identify physico-biochemical cope-up processes of biomolecules, cells, organelles and organisms which can vary from species to species. Moreover, recent omics techniques have provided a powerful tool for understanding the stress adaptive response in fish. Furthermore, for profitable and sustainable aquaculture production, it is important to improve fish welfare, besides keeping the level of stressors/pollutants/xenobiotics in culture water below the undesirable level. As such, this Topic also intends to address promising strategies/methods/tools towards mitigating multiple-water borne stressors that are prevalent in aquaculture systems. This Topic will be of enormous significance for improving the welfare of farmed fish in various disciplines including water quality monitoring, toxicology, stress management, health, breeding, nutrient utilization and metabolic waste. This will in turn have an impact on the quality of fish food that is globally marketed.

The scope revolves around integrated research on the aquatic environment, aquaculture, comparative (fish and shellfish) physiology, bio-monitoring, environmental pollution, nutrition and stress mitigation. This implies for both marine and freshwater environments.

All formats of contributions (e.g. original research papers, opinions, full reviews, mini-reviews) will be considered.

The Guest Editors would like to encourage all interested individuals and research groups to submit a manuscript to this Research Topic. Please know that abstract submission is not mandatory, manuscripts can be submitted even without sending an abstract beforehand.

Keywords: Stress, Food security, Mitigation, Toxicology, Physiology, Climate change, Fish response, Aquaculture, Water quality, Sustainability

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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