Nathan Bott

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at RMIT University

The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) holds the richest array of marine life found anywhere in Australia, including a diverse and fascinating parasite fauna. Members of one group, the trematodes, occur as sexually mature adult worms in almost all GBR bony fish species. Although the first reports of these parasites were made 100 years ago, the fauna has been...

Most surveillance programmes for marine invasive species (MIS) require considerable taxonomic expertise, are laborious, and are unable to identify species at larval or juvenile stages. Therefore, marine pests may go undetected at the initial stages of incursions when population densities are low. In this study, we evaluated the ability of the bench...

We examined four species of Plectropomus Oken, 1817 (Serranidae: Epinephelinae), Plectropomus areolatus (Rüppell), Plectropomus laevis (Lacepède), Plectropomus leopardus (Lacepède) and Plectropomus maculatus (Bloch) from sites off Heron Island and Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia (GBR), and the Gambier Islands, French Polynesia. T...

Aporocotylids (fish blood flukes) are emerging as pathogens of fishes in both marine and freshwater aquaculture. Efforts to control these parasites are hampered by a lack of life cycle information. Here we report on the life cycle of Cardicola forsteri, which is considered a significant pathogen in southern bluefin tuna, Thunnus maccoyi, ranched in...

Handfish (Family Brachionichthyidae) is the most threatened marine teleost fish family, however, there is little information on handfish health. We reviewed the results of submissions of mortalities from captive and captive bred spotted handfish ( Branchionichthys hirsutus (Lacepède, 1804)) and red handfish ( Thymichthys politus (Richardson, 1844))...

Aporocotylid blood flukes Cardicola forsteri and C. orientalis are an ongoing health concern for the Southern Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus maccoyii, SBT) industry, where infections can lead to morbidity and mortality in ranched SBT populations. This study compared blood fluke infection in SBT from two companies during the 2021 ranching season. Both compan...

Aporocotylid blood flukes Cardicola forsteri and C. orientalis are an ongoing health concern for Southern Bluefin Tuna (SBT), Thunnus maccoyii , ranched in Australia. Therapeutic application of praziquantel (PZQ) has reduced SBT mortalities, however PZQ is not a residual treatment therefore reinfection can occur after the single treatment applicati...

The blood fluke Cardicola forsteri (Trematoda: Aporocotylidae) is a pathogen of ranched bluefin tuna in Japan and Australia. Genomics of Cardicola spp. have thus far been limited to molecular phylogenetics of select gene sequences. In this study, sequencing of the C. forsteri genome was performed using Illumina short-read and Oxford Nanopore long-r...

Nitrogen compounds, especially ammonia, are widely produced in aquaculture systems during cultivation. Ammonia has been investigated as a model compound for use by heterotrophic nitrifying bacteria. Pseudomonas TT321 and Pseudomonas TT322, isolated from shrimp pond water in Soc Trang province, Vietnam, are identified by comparing them with 31 of th...

Parasitic diseases are major constraints in fish mariculture. The anthelmintic praziquantel (PZQ) can effectively treat a range of flatworm parasites in a variety of fish species and has potential for broader application than its current use in the global aquaculture industry. In this review we report on PZQ's current use in the aquaculture industr...

The parasitic blood flukes Cardicola forsteri and C. orientalis are an ongoing health concern for Southern Bluefin Tuna Thunnus maccoyii (SBT) ranched in Australia. In this study we compared the effect of treatment, company, and ranching year on blood fluke infections in ranched SBT. SBT were sampled during the 2018 and 2019 ranching seasons from p...

Infections by blood flukes (Cardicola spp.) are considered the most significant health issue for ranched bluefin tuna, a major aquaculture industry in Japan and Australia. The host–parasite interfaces of trematodes, namely their teguments, are particularly rich in carbohydrates, which function both in evasion and modulation of the host immune syste...

Based on a total of 6,295,650 sequences from the V3 and V4 regions (16S ribosomal RNA), the composition of the microorganism communities in the water of three Litopenaeus vannamei (Decapoda, Whiteleg shrimp; Soc Trang, Vietnam) ponds were identified. Pseudomonas (10–20.29%), Methylophilus (13.26–24.28%), and Flavobacterium (2.6–19.29%) were the mos...

Presence of biofouling on pontoons and other structures can have adverse effects on fish health, both by affecting water quality and acting as a reservoir for pathogens. This study focused on three species of parasites affecting Southern Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus maccoyii) (SBT): the blood flukes Cardicola forsteri and Cardicola orientalis and the scut...

We surveyed 30 individuals of Tylosurus gavialoides (Castelnau) (Belonidae) collected from Moreton Bay, Queensland, Australia, and describe three new species of Prosorhynchoides Dollfus, 1929 from them. The new species are morphologically distinct from existing Prosorhynchoides spp. and 28S and ITS-2 ribosomal DNA data further supports our morpholo...

The establishment and subsequent spread of invasive species is widely recognised as one of the most threatening processes contributing to global biodiversity loss. This is especially true for marine and estuarine ecosystems, which have experienced significant increases in the number of invasive species with the increase in global maritime trade. Un...

Scuticociliates are ubiquitous worldwide organisms that live in the sea sediment and feed on suspended particulate matters like bacteria, microalgae or protozoa. Under certain circumstances this ciliates can behave as opportunistic histophagous parasites entering the olfactory rosettes of the fish during olfaction, feeding on cells and tissue, wher...

Plankton survey for northern pacific seastar in Victorian coastal waters

Final report, development of PCR assays for Carcinus maenas, Ciona intestinalis and Undaria pinnatifida

Final report; qPCR assays for detection of Musculista senhousia, Corbula gibba and Perna canaliculus

Final report: qpCR assay to detect Mytilopsis sallei

Final report: Plankton sampling protocol for invasive species surveillance

Final report: qPCR assays for the detection of Crassotrea gigas

Final report documenting the development of qPCR assays for marine invasive species

Marine invasive species incursions can cause significant ongoing damage to marine environments, aquaculture, biodiversity, infrastructure, and social amenity. They represent a significant and ongoing economic burden. Marine pests can be introduced by several vectors, including aquaculture, aquarium trading, commercial shipping, fishing, floating de...

Comprehensive dietary information for the endangered Australian sea lion (Neophoca cinerea) is currently limited by the deficiency and poor quality of identifiable prey remains recovered from regurgitate and faeces and the difficulty of observing feeding in the wild. In this study, we investigated DNA-based prey detection methods using conventional...

We applied DNA-based faecal analysis to determine the diet of female Australian sea lions (n = 12) from two breeding colonies in South Australia. DNA dietary components of fish and cephalopods were amplified using the polymerase chain reaction and mitochondrial DNA primers targeting the short (~100 base pair) section of the 16S gene region. Prey di...

Uncorrected genetic divergences of SSU sequences between MIS species. Genetic divergences between the 12 species listed in Table 1 and based on the V1–V3 region of SSU. aNumbers in brackets correspond to the species reference number shown in Figure 1. (XLSX)

Detailed description of best BLASTn hits of all sequences obtained from environmental samples spiked with Asterias amurensis larvae. Tables show the query sequences lengths, number of hits, minimum BLAST e-values, mean similarities, GenBank accession numbers, and the corresponding taxonomic description. (XLSX)

Linear regression analysis. Graphics show the correlations between number of sequences and relative abundances of starting DNA/PCR material obtained in A) decreasing DNA treatment 2, B) increasing DNA treatment 3, C) decreasing PCR treatment 5, and D) increasing PCR treatment 6. (EPS)

Pyrosequencing reads for treatments 1–6 (fasta format). (ZIP)

Pyrosequencing reads for treatments 7–12 (fasta format). (ZIP)

List of fusion primers and fusion primer combinations used in this study. (XLSX)

Reference DNA sequence alignment for the COI gene (fasta format). (FASTA)

Reference DNA sequence alignment for the SSU gene (fasta format). (FAS)

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