Aquaculture has emerged as one of the fastest growing agri-food systems, playing an increasingly important role in global nutrition security and contributing economic welfare to rural and coastal regions (Beveridge et al., 2013; Béné et al., 2016). At the same time the sector in globally important regions of the world like Southeast Asia remains vulnerable to a range of production risks, related to farming conditions, disease, processing and trade issues related to environmental and social sustainability (Little et al., 2016, 2018; Ahmed and Thompson, 2019; Bush et al., 2019). For the aquaculture sector to maintain its important role as a globally important sector, continual innovation of farming systems and sector level systems of response to key issues like disease are therefore required (Lebel et al., 2010; Asche and Smith, 2018; Joffre et al., 2018).