ANALYSIS OF MEETING ABSTRACTS AS AN INDICATOR OF EMERGING ISSUES IN STRESS AND CULTURED AQUATIC SPECIES

New ideas in science are often introduced at society meetings months or years before those ideas appear in published literature. While not peer-reviewed, meeting abstracts reveal concepts that dominate the conversation in knowledge areas at society meetings. Meeting abstracts from recent WAS and AFS meetings were reviewed in an attempt to determine what concepts dominate the discussion of stress in cultured aquatic species. Generally, "stress" appears in the title of about 1.5% of abstracts from a society meeting, but the word "stress" appears in about 6.8% of abstracts. The word "stress" appears only once in 57% of abstracts where the word appears at least once (Figure 1).

In all but one case (n=32), when the word "stress" was included only once in an abstract, the presentation was not about stress. In 79% of abstracts that included the word stress, the subject of stress was introduced as a justification for the work, not as the focus of the presentation. In only 39% of abstracts that included the word stress, was there a comparison of a quantitative stress response among treatment and control groups.

Although plasma cortisol was a common quantitative stress response reported in presentations, other common quantitative stress responses included upregulated miRNAs, glutaredoxins, upregulation of immune response genes, upregulation of genes involved in oxidative stress (e.g. SOD), serum glucose, and HSP70. Concepts most frequently associated with stress, in descending order, included temperature, diet, immunology, the environment, water quality, and oxygen level. While the sources of stress in cultured fish addressed in society presentations are as one might expect, new molecular and cellular techniques are leading to the quantification of stress responses beyond simple measurements of serum cortisol, glucose, or chlorides. Measuring upregulation and downregulation of genes known to code for proteins involved in stress responses appears to be an emerging technique for understanding the role of stress in cultured aquatic organisms.