Short-term residence, home range size and diel patterns of the painted comber Serranus scriba in a temperate marine reserve

Abstract

We examined the short-term movements of a small temperate fish, the painted comber Serranus scriba (Linnaeus 1758), within the marine protected area (MPA) of Palma Bay (NW Mediterranean) using passive acoustic telemetry. Fifteen adults were surgically implanted with acoustic transmitters and monitored between July 2007 and February 2008 for periods of up to 36 d. Interindividual variability was detected for both spatial and temporal patterns. There were 2 principal movement behaviours that were recorded, with some individuals showing high site fidelity and others showing a more mobile behaviour, moving out from the monitoring area. Observation-area curves indicated that a period between 3 and 5 d was required to determine home ranges of the sedentary fish. Home range sizes were small, with a minimum shift of core areas occurring on a daily basis. Total minimum convex polygon (MCP) areas ranged between 0.102 and 0.671 km 2 , whereas 95% kernel utilization distributions (KUD) ranged between 0.760 and 1.333 km . There were no significant differences in home range patterns between day and night periods. However, the use of the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) revealed diel rhythms on the detection pattern that could be related to a resting behaviour at night. Estimation of home ranges of S. scriba agrees with the sedentary habits of the Serranidae family and suggests the potential use of MPAs for the sustainable development of the fishery of this small Serranid.

Diel behaviour and habitat utilisation by the pearly razorfish during the spawning season

“…Wavelet analysis has been used successfully to determine periodicities in other Mediterranean fishes and at other time scales (March et al 2010, Alós et al 2011, confirming the usefulness of this tool for detecting regime shifts in fish movement. The diel behaviour exhibited by X. novacula was independent of sex and, thus, not due to a factor affecting general detections, such as the thicker body wall in males (because males are bigger than females).…”

“…This is the case for many species associated with a particular structure, such as many reef fish species (e.g. Topping et al 2005) and even some species inhabiting seagrass meadows (March et al 2010, Alós et al 2011.This also appears to be the case for Xyrichtys novacula. It is well known that this species exhibits feeding (Cardinale et al 1997), mating (experiment performed in the spawning season; Marconato et al 1995, Cardinale et al 1998) and social behaviours (Marconato et al 1995) during the day.…”

“…Normal behaviour (main ly characterised by the diel pattern) subsequently returned for all of the tagged fish. Therefore, this result should be considered in further experiments in this species.Significant changes in diel behaviour have previously been reported for marine coastal species in the Mediterranean (Jadot et al 2002, March et al 2010, Alós et al 2011. However, the ability to infer diel behaviour from detection patterns is a controversial issue, and different behaviours can generate the same diel detection pattern, including daily migrations (e.g.…”

“…usno.navy.mil/) were used to develop temporal categories of day and night based on local sunrise and sunset data. In terms of temporal patterns, the number of days on which a specific tagged fish (i) was detected (DD i ) was divided by the period between the release and the last detection date (TP i ) to calculate a residence index (RI i ) within the receiver array (March et al 2010, Alós et al 2011. The temporal pattern of detections was then examined by visually examining chronograms of the hourly detections of each individual and the hourly means plot of the detections.…”

“…The sowas library in R package (www.r-project.org/) was used to compute the 2-dimensional wavelet spectrum and to perform a point-wise test at a 95% significance level for each tagged fish and for the control tag (Maraun et al 2007). Wavelet coefficient values were normalised such that the highest spectral power was equal to 1 (March et al 2010).The spatial analysis was based on the NadarayaWatson kernel estimator (sm library in R; Bowman & Azzalini 1997), which was used to calculate the centre of activity positions (COAs) for the tracked fish i in 60 min time steps. Thus, estimation of the XY i po sitions for Fish i was based on the positions of the re ceivers that detected the fish during a specific time-step period and weighted by the number of de tec tions (Simpfendorfer et al 2002).…”