In Dr Landos's view, many of Australia's estuarine fisheries, the engine room for the many fish and other marine organisms, are suffering the effects of agrichemical inflows that form mixtures of compounds that are poorly understood, he said.

"We have an assessment process that does not take into account real tank mixtures. In the real world, farmers put multiple products into the spray tanks, but at the regulatory level products are only assessed one by one."

Nor does Australia have data about the sensitivity of fish to different chemicals, said Dr Landos, who is director the Future Fisheries Veterinary Service and president of the Aquatic Animal Health Chapter of the College of Veterinary Scientists.

He notes that international research has shown that trout and catfish have a 1000 times difference in their sensitivity to certain chemicals.

Dr Landos and the only other vet on the Noosa Fish Health Investigation Taskforce were the two dissenting voices in the finding that links could not be made between fish deaths and deformities in the Sunland Fish Hatchery and spray drift from a nearby macadamia farm.

Despite the findings of majority of the taskforce, and a subsequent independent review by toxicologists which last week concluded that “the evidence collected does not establish with any degree of certainty that chemicals from the macadamia farm were the single or primary causal agent for the reported events at the hatchery”, Dr Landos remains adamant that Australia's chemical assessment procedures are inadequate.