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Dr Susan Gibson-Kueh was once ridiculed at vet school in Sydney for choosing prawns for her research project. Now as a pioneer in South-East Asia’s burgeoning aquaculture industry, she’s enjoying the last laugh. By Tracey Porter
If passion could be traded for coin then Dr Susan Gibson-Kueh would surely be one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. While her colleagues frequently remind her that not everyone can be expected to get as excited about finfish and shellfish as she does, it’s almost impossible not to be captivated by her fervour for all things invertebrate, whether she’s explaining why not all pathogens are bad or why psychology is changing the future of aquatic animal health.
How it all began
Dr Gibson-Kueh is a diagnostic fish pathologist with a special interest in the study of complex fish diseases.
Currently a senior research fellow at James Cook University in Singapore, she has enjoyed a longstanding connection to Australia. She undertook her BVSc at Sydney University in the 1980s, later completing her PhD through Murdoch University in Perth, where last May she was named an honorary senior research fellow.
Between 2007 and 2019 she was an adjunct professor at Murdoch, teaching veterinary histology, parasitology and fish medicine.
Dr Gibson-Kueh says she was drawn to the aquaculture sector because of her interest in population medicine but she recognised early that general practice was not for her.
“I think I would be quite happy working in population medicine anywhere, but I think fish is quite new. The area in which I now specialise is fish disease and fish pathology and it is an exciting area because it is not well prescribed.”
Dr Gibson-Kueh initially made a name for herself by being the first researcher to document the causative agent of scale drop in barramundi.
In recent years her profile has risen dramatically as a result of her sustainable aquaculture interests after Singapore signed up for the ‘30 by 30’ Food Security Goal—an initiative that sees governments around the world agree to designate 30 per cent of the earth’s land and ocean mass as protected areas by 2030.
With extensive experience in aquatic animal health—which she describes as “intensive agriculture in the water”—including roles in both government and academia, Dr Gibson-Kueh’s current research is focused on the pathological journey of the herpes virus.
It helps being a problem solver
It was while studying in Sydney that Dr Gibson-Kueh first had an inkling that not everyone shared her appetite for this niche.
“When I was in vet school my class was a nice bunch, but they laughed at me because in my final year I did a little research project on giant freshwater prawns. They told me, ‘Oh Susan, you don’t treat prawns, you eat them.’ In response I said to them, ‘But we need to treat them so there is enough of them to eat’.”
Despite Australia being the world’s largest island, vets have only been involved with the care of aquatic fauna here for the past 50 or so years. Before this, the majority of this work was undertaken by zoologists and government personnel.
When you farm fish, you change the environment so it keeps things in the favour of disease-causing agents. If we can learn to do it better or understand why disease happens when it does, then going forward we can ensure we do not do those things.
Dr Susan Gibson-Kueh, James Cook University
Dr Gibson-Kueh says currently there are two types of vets who work in the sector—those who work on the frontline and those who don’t. Frontline workers deal with about 80 per cent of the problems while those with more of a bent towards academia “deal with the 20 per cent of the problems that no-one else can solve”, she says.
Still much to learn
Her experiences have taught her that the key to successful management of diseases lies in advancing current knowledge based on applied fish physiology, immunology and gene expression.
“Disease is not necessarily bad. Everybody gets hyped about COVID-19 but we’re not all going to die from it, right? It was one of those things that happened and we’ve had to learn to live with it. When you farm fish, you change the environment so it keeps things in the favour of disease-causing agents.
“If we can learn to do it better or understand why disease happens when it does, then going forward we can ensure we do not do those things.”
Dr Gibson-Kueh says while there is still much to learn about viral diseases in fish, one of the things that has surprised her is the different ways such afflictions behave in freshwater and marine fish.
If the same disease happens in marine fish, they die much faster, she says.
Room for growth
While working with fish has been her obsession for some time, Dr Gibson-Kueh says there remains room for improvement within the broader aquaculture field.
Boasting significant potential that is not particularly optimised in either Australia or Singapore, change is needed if more vet graduates are to consider specialising in this field, she says.
With only a limited number of positions available within state primary industry departments, many aquaculture vets feel they have no choice but to turn to commercial marine farming operations.
While there are more young people showing interest in this sector, a lot of them cannot find full-time work working in fish because of the divide caused by those operating fish farms, she says.
“It’s not easy to work with some of the fish farms, because a lot of them are investors so they are dollar driven. They are managed by people who are engineers so that doesn’t help. They always think that technology can solve everything but that is not true. Farms don’t know what kind of knowledge they need to know. When they don’t know what they don’t know, they make all these decisions blindly and it will never work.”
Dr Gibson-Kueh says a lack of mentors is also restricting progress. However, as the sector continues to evolve, this too will improve, she says.
“It makes it easier when you have someone to guide you as it shortens the journey for when you arrive. I hope the people that follow after me will find it simpler and have a better time of it.”
