Work Package 4

Mucosal health and stress resilience of salmon exposed to H2S

Leader: Nofima – Carlo C. Lazado

Mucosal surfaces are responsive and plastic to the different changes in the aquatic environment. Though we are still far from directly being able to use them as a proxy for overall health status, our current understanding provides strong evidence of a direct link between mucosal health and the overall health status of fish.

In this WP, we will provide a targeted yet comprehensive understanding of how H2S influences the health status of salmon by focusing our response variables on mucosal tissues.

This focus is based on two reasons:

  • 1) the host-H2S contact as described in WP2;
  • 2) it offers a possibility to exploit the mucosa for the development a non/minimally-invasive sample collection technique (i.e., mucus, biopsy) for detection of H2S responses.

We hypothesise that chronic exposure to H2S affects the health status through impairment of mucosal functionality hence leading to compromised robustness. A stress resilience test has been designed to test this hypothesis.