White spot disease in aquaculture farms

Aquaculture farms in Queensland must act to prevent, manage, and respond to white spot disease (WSD).

These actions are critical to:

Prevent

You must take proactive steps to stop WSD from entering or spreading on your farm.

Develop a biosecurity plan:

  • include procedures to prevent disease
  • outline steps to manage outbreaks.

Comply with your general biosecurity obligation:

Signage requirements

If your farm is located in the Logan River region, you must:

  • install and maintain clear signage on your property
  • label drainage and intake channels to identify biosecurity risks
  • use the approved signage format for WSD fishing restrictions.

Proper signage helps to:

  • identify high-risk areas for fishers
  • support good biosecurity practices
  • stop WSD from spreading through water systems.

Movement restrictions

Aquaculture farms in South East Queensland must comply with WSD movement restrictions.

You must also decontaminate machinery or equipment travelling out of the movement regulated area.

Manage

If you suspect WSD, you must act immediately to contain the disease:

  1. Identify and isolate affected stock (pond or tank).
  2. Prevent water from moving between affected and unaffected ponds or tanks and into surrounding waterways.
  3. Prevent animals (e.g. birds) from accessing and feeding on affected animals where possible.
  4. Limit staff, visitor, vehicle and machinery access to affected areas.

Report suspected disease

Under Queensland legislation, if you suspect WSD in any crustacean you must either:

Response to an outbreak

When you report WSD, we will provide instructions to help you manage the outbreak.

These may include:

  • strengthening movement controls for animals, staff, vehicles and equipment
  • reducing wildlife risks by controlling crabs and implementing bird mitigation measures
  • tracing and monitoring disease spread
  • destroying infected prawns in affected ponds
  • decontaminating ponds and equipment after disposing of affected animals.

We may also require you to conduct an emergency harvest. Reducing the prawn population in affected ponds helps contain the disease and supports decontamination efforts.

Biosecurity management plans case study

Watch this case study to learn the benefits of having a biosecurity management plan.

Alistair Dick, Business and Operations Manager of Seafarms, Cardwell, Far North Queensland talks about the benefits of having a biosecurity management plan and explains how they implement the 5 general principles of good biosecurity on their farm:

  1. Have a management plan.
  2. Come clean go clean—movement of people and vehicles on and off property.
  3. Management of visitors—restrict on and off and around their property.
  4. Controlling feral/wild animals—bring potential of spreading diseases, or move pathogens.
  5. Clear signage.

  • [Alistair Dick, Business and Operations Manager, Seafarms Queensland]

    Biosecurity is important to me to really protect the welfare of our livestock, but also the welfare of our staff and also the interests of our shareholders.

    There's a full induction package on biosecurity that all our staff have to go through and for visitors, but also in relation to how to respond if there's any issues as well.

    At all our entry points there's 'no unauthorised entry' signs. Visitors need to go through our offices to sign in if they're authorised to do so, and then that includes hand and foot washes and then obviously the vehicle wash, our vehicle getting fully sprayed underneath and above.

    In aquaculture, like in other livestock industries, we've got a number of different pathways for potential pathogens to come onto site and I guess we can break them into two categories, horizontal transmissions and vertical transmissions.

    Vertical transmissions we tend to manage through our breeding programs, so we test all of our stock that come on the farm, all of our brood stock, and then once they're on site, we can manage the stock through routine surveillance. Selective breeding is very much a part of those activities and I think the biosecurity attached to that is often understated.

    With regards to horizontal transmissions, making sure that we manage our water, both inflow and outflow, our interactions with wildlife. So we have a wildlife interaction plan to make sure that other animals can't bring diseases onto site. The way we manage our husbandry on site is very important as well. So routine health checks. If animals are growing well, then they tend to be healthy, which actually equates into proper biosecurity practices as well.

    We have biosecurity zones as well. So particularly for the hatchery which deals with you know, the highest biosecurity zoning through our breeding programs.

    We have to move through the biosecurity zones in our visit, so that we manage it in a hierarchical way, moving from highest to lowest. On the farms, we've got a wildlife interaction plan to manage our interactions with wildlife. You will see some birds around here, so we do have a bird-scaring drone. We also have gas scaring guns, bird mitigation permits to control birds under certain circumstances as well.

    All around the farm we have a perimeter fence. Of course, crocodiles represent a unique challenge in aquaculture. Not only do they potentially eat your livestock, they tend to be mostly smaller animals, but they do move from pond to pond and that's an obvious biosecurity breach.

    Biosecurity in an area, for example, is only as strong as the weakest link. So if your neighbour has a breach, then it's likely to affect your business as well. So it's very important to engage with other local producers and really have a local approach to biosecurity to make sure that both of your enterprises are adequately managed.

    The worst thing that's happened to our industry, probably in its entire 35 to 40 year timeframe has really been white spot. And of course the issue with white spot virus, it can cause close to 100% mortality, and being exotic it means that your stock is going to get destroyed and you're going to be without an income.

    So, if you're in a white spot area as an example, then you'll be wanting to have adequate control measures in place to manage white spot. Most people in agriculture will have encountered some sort of pest or disease, whether you're a banana farmer, a small crop farmer, a cattle farmer, you will have encountered some disease and if you're a good farmer, you would have spent a lot of time and you would have been talking to people both in the government and other farmers, about what the best techniques are for mitigating those risks.

    And then you'd be writing them into your plans and training your staff on how to implement those plans to mitigate those risks, both short and long term.

    So I think for me as a long time farmer, I find that it kind of lives in your DNA a fair bit and a lot of pragmatism is required to understand that and deal with it on a daily basis.

    I think that would be good advice for other farmers.

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