Such pleotropic distribution of IL-1β and IL-8 across several tissues of healthy fish has already been described for other teleost species (Pelegrin et al., 2001; Scapigliati et al., 2001; Engelsma et al., 2003; Chen et al., 2005; Qiu et al., 2009; Wang et al., 2013), suggesting that these cytokines are probably involved in biological processes other than the response to pathogenic infections. The gene discussed is IL1B; the disease is infection.