World Aquaculture Magazine - June 2021

12 JUNE 2021 • WORLD AQUACULTURE • WWW.WA S .ORG P rof. Donald V. Lightner, a towering figure in the research of infectious diseases in shrimp, passed away on May 5 in Tucson, Arizona. He will be missed by his family and friends, and colleagues from academia and industry alike worldwide. The world of aquaculture, especially aquatic animal disease specialists, has lost an icon. In the 1970s, Dr. Lightner put together a team of researchers at The University of Arizona that provided much of the basic knowledge on shrimp diseases and health that enabled shrimp aquaculture grow into a global industry that now supplies more than two-thirds of all the shrimp consumed around the world. Virtually every shrimp disease practitioner in the world has had some connection with Dr. Lightner and the Aquaculture Pathology Laboratory at the University of Arizona. Dr. Lightner’s contributions were not only in the academic arena, with hundreds of scientific articles, industry reports, conference presentations, graduate students and short courses but also applied directly on his visits to farms around the world. Without the work of Dr. Lightner and his lab in Tucson, the shrimp aquaculture industry would not be what it is today, a multi- billion-dollar industry supporting the employment of millions of people worldwide. It is because of Dr. Lightner’s pioneering work in shrimp diseases that the price of shrimp moderated to the point that shrimp became the most-consumed seafood item in the United States. Dr. Lightner was at the forefront of developing the science of shrimp pathology, and without that science, shrimp farmers would not have been able to navigate the ever-changing landscape of shrimp health. Time and time again, when a new disease appeared in the shrimp industry, it was Dr. Lightner and his laboratory colleagues who provided the discovery of the pathogen or disease agent, doing so with efficiency when others had failed. Dr. Lightner became interested in the diseases of aquatic animals when he worked as a trout farm technician for the Colorado Game and Fish Department. The trout farmwas suffering significant losses from a common disease of farm-raised trout, so the farm manager began a treatment for the disease without first checking the hardness of the source water. By the time, the “treatment” was complete, several tons of trout had died, and Lightner was assigned I N M E M O R I A M Donald V. Lightner, 1945-2021 the task of burial of those fish. With that background, he focused his graduate studies on becoming a fish pathologist. In 1971, he received his Ph.D. in Fish Pathology fromColorado State University. He then took a position at the National Marine Fisheries Laboratory in Galveston, Texas, working with the team developing the basics of captive culture of shrimp and began the first shrimp pathology program in the US. In 1975, he moved to the University of Arizona and worked on shrimp health issues at the research station in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico, the shrimp culture display at EPCOT Center in Florida and the Marine Culture Enterprise project in Hawaii. He was part of the team that developed super-intensive culture (>5 kg/m2) of blue shrimp Penaeus stylirostris in enclosed tanks and raceways. During those early days, visual inspection of sick shrimp and histological examination were the basic tools. The Handbook of Normal Penaeid Shrimp Histology (1988) arose from this early work and remains as a primary literature source on histology of shrimp. This book remains the most popular book sold by the World Aquaculture Society, with multiple print runs. In 1986, Dr. Lightner started the University of Arizona Shrimp Pathology Laboratory. He quickly adapted various other diagnostic techniques from human and animal medicine to address the widening circle of shrimp diseases. He also added expertise to his teamwith specialists in viral, bacterial, fungal and parasitic infections. In 1989, Dr. Lightner and his cutting-edge team began offering an on-campus Shrimp Pathology Short Course, open to all that wished to learn the science of shrimp disease diagnostics. By the time he retired in 2015, more than 1500 specialists from 59 countries around the world had been trained. In addition to training people through the Shrimp Pathology Short Course, Dr. Lightner and his team conducted numerous on-site trainings on shrimp pathology in shrimp farming regions around the world. Dr. Lightner was one of the unique few that combined unequaled skills at interpreting shrimp histology slides with the newer technologies provided by molecular science. The knowledge Dr. Lightner imparted to his students in these courses can now be found in every country with a shrimp industry.