Welcome to Oyster Health Sydney!
This comes to you from the Aquatic Animal Health team in the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Sydney. We hope you enjoy this site, the opportunity it provides to view our research, and the means it gives you to offer advice, comments and suggestions to assist our research program.
We believe that healthy oysters are central to a sustainable oyster industry. But how do you assess health, and what factors determine whether a healthy batch will remain healthy in the presence of disease threats? How does the environment affect the immune system of the oyster? How can oysters be managed to minimise the risk of losses due to infectious diseases? These are some of the questions we will try to answer in our multidisciplinary research program.
We work closely with oyster growers and this gives us great insight because of accumulated knowledge about the best methods for oyster farming. Implicitly this includes many valuable practices to avoid common diseases. Unfortunately the emergence of new diseases in the last few decades has changed the game and stimulated a search for new solutions. This is where science and research must step up to meet the challenge.
Australia currently faces a scourge due to Pacific Oyster Mortality Syndrome (POMS), which is associated with herpesvirus infection. This blog will be focussed for some time on the POMS need – you can find details on the page “Our POMS research”. The principles we use in this research are common to most disease threats, and we will not loose sight of other important problems. In New South Wales this means QX disease and winter mortality syndrome. Over time we hope to discover how they tick!
Oyster Health Sydney 