review · Aquaculture
Vibriosis is a widespread bacterial disease affecting shrimp, marine fish, and freshwater species, leading to high mortality rates and severe economic losses for fish farms. While antibiotics have historically been used to manage outbreaks, environmental risks and regulatory restrictions by bodies such as the FDA increasingly limit their deployment. Probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics offer approved and practical alternatives to strengthen fish immunity and enhance disease resistance. These immunomodulators can be administered as food or water additives, improving fish welfare, reducing pathogen-related mortality, and lowering reliance on chemical treatments. Synthesising recent literature on these biological interventions highlights their mechanisms of action and utility in establishing more sustainable disease management practices across diverse finfish aquaculture operations.
Fish farming is a vital global source of protein, but bacterial infections like vibriosis threaten its productivity. Overreliance on antibiotics poses environmental hazards and food safety challenges for consumers. Utilising natural immunomodulators such as probiotics and prebiotics offers a cleaner, safer way to protect aquatic stock, ensuring resilient food production without accelerating chemical pollution.
The findings point to direct commercial applications for aquafeed manufacturers and fish farm operators developing or adopting functional feeds and water additives. Because probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics are already approved and applied alternatives in aquaculture, the approach is applied and tested, though specific commercial formulations targeting vibriosis across different finfish species remain an area of ongoing implementation.
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The aquaculture industry is still expanding to provide human beings with healthy and nutritious protein sources. Infectious diseases, deteriorated water quality parameters, and other environmental stressors are from the main obstacles that threaten fish farming and reduce its profitability. Vibriosis is one of the most common bacterial diseases that negatively affect shrimp, marine fishes, and some freshwater fish causing high mortalities and severe economic loss. Chemotherapeutic agents as antibiotics are commonly applied for treatment strategies; however, their numerous drawbacks to fish and the aquatic environment have limited their use. Moreover, FDA has prohibited certain antibiotics from being used for food fish to avoid their negative consequences on human consumers. Water quality control and biosecurity protocols are traditionally applied to combat vibriosis. Nowadays, immunomodulators are greatly used and described throughout the globe to enhance the fish immunity. In this concern, probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics have become common solutions to increase the fish resistance against vibriosis. They were approved to be current alternatives to limit the usage of antibiotics in aquaculture resulting in less mortality and increased health and welfare of the aquatic organisms. Many studies speculated that probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics could be efficiently and effectively used as food or water additives to increase immunity, thereby reducing the mortality caused by several fish pathogens such as Vibrio species. Comprehensively, this review article presents the latest knowledge on the potential roles of probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics to boost immunity and reduce the impacts of vibriosis in several finfish species. This review article will also provide new findings and possible mechanisms of action of probiotics, prebiotics, and synbiotics to control vibriosis in fish. These literature will be helpful to increase the sustainability of aquaculture and health welfare of farmed fish.
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DOI: 10.1016/j.aquaculture.2021.737514
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