Dr Richard Taylor

As a marine biology undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin in the early 1980’s my interest in Aquaculture began with a visit to assist a rainbow trout sea cage farmer during a major algal bloom event. This should have served as a warning to choose another career, but I was fascinated with the opportunity to impact fish production and welfare through the application of biological principles and the chance of an outdoor lifestyle. Although the salmon industry was very small in Ireland at that time, I was fortunate to enrol in the new Masters in Aquaculture at University College, Cork in 1985. This gave me the opportunity to gain practical experience on salmon hatcheries, sea cage farms and a pump-ashore trout farm and to complete an M.Sc. thesis on ‘the biology and treatment of sea lice on a commercial Atlantic salmon farm’. Following this I moved to Co. Mayo (salmon) and spent some months in Portugal (rainbow trout in lake cages). From 1988, I was employed by Ireland’s largest salmon farming company (Salmara Fisheries Ltd.) as biologist and farm manager. In 1994 I migrated to take up a position as Regional Stock Manager at Tassal Ltd., responsible for fish health and production. In this time I developed an in-depth operational understanding of Amoebic Gill Disease (AGD) management, introduced aeration (‘venturation’) technologies and real-time in-pen sensors to support fish during summer and hypoxia stress. In 2005 I moved to CSIRO to support the newly established Atlantic salmon selective breeding program (SBP) and between 2006 and 2010 completed a Ph.D. study "Assessment of resistance to amoebic gill disease in the Tasmanian Atlantic salmon selective breeding program". I now work across a variety of fish health and breeding related projects in support of applied outcomes for the aquaculture industry.