ISAAH 6 underway!

Today was registration day for the International Symposium on Aquatic Animal Health at the (very grand) Marriott Waterside in Tampa.  Usually thats a mellow check-in day but it was also ExCom meeting time for the Fish Health Section and then a Session Chair co-ordination meeting.  I was delighted to see again a colleague from Kamchatka, Tatiana Gavruseva, who I first met at a US/Russian bilateral exchange meeting last year in the DC area.  Kamchatka-Moscow-Washington-Tampa - what a flight, can you imagine? I am aurprised she can keep her eyes open.

Ice-breaker calls….

Tampa - brace yourselves...

Next week I will be in sunny Tampa for the 6th International Symposium on Aquatic Animal Health, a great meeting that happens every four years covering the gamut of AAH from aquaculture to fisheries to aquariums and even marine mammals (they’re OK too, ‘spose).  The energetic Andy Kane from UF and the lovely and talented Sarah Poynton from Johns Hopkins are chairing the program and it looks to be a great set of folks attending. They’ve got me co-chairing a session about parasites in molluscs, which should be fun, and my own talk will be about metabolomics in whale sharks, a collaboration with colleagues at Georgia Tech.  What’s metabolomics, I hear you say?  Well, perhaps I’ll post about it while I’m there (you know, AFTER I make the powerpoint.  I should probably start that…).

The AGM for the Fish Health Section of the American Fisheries Society will also be there, so we’ll be mixing hundreds of science talks with some serious chit-chat about the state of fish health science in this country, which has evolved significantly of late, in part because of new disease epizootics (VHSV anyone?), the National Aquatic Animal Health Plan and the increasing role of veterinarians in fish health research (the more the merrier, I say).

Should be a great meeting.  Anyone got any “must hit” spots while I am there? or want to meet up for a cuban sandwich, or better yet, a couple of cervezas?