144th Annual Meeting of the American Fisheries Society

August 17 - 21, 2014

Understanding fish migration, its drivers and determinants, not only touches fundamental ecological questions but has also relevance to fisheries management and conservation fields. Fish abilities to migrate involve various orientation and navigation strategies which are far from being well-known and understood. Recent advances in technologies used to track aquatic species such acoustic tags, pop-up archival tags and novel tags, allow researchers to track fish for longer periods of time and in more accurate ways, improving our understanding of routes, behaviours and intra and interspecies interactions. Such advances in tracking methods and the increasing use of electronic tags on fish involve the necessity of data sharing as well as a better linkage with physical oceanography sciences in order to access to the consequences of environmental variability on species’movements, and subsequently on species distributions and abundance. In keeping with this objective, the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN, http://oceantrackingnetwork.org) is deploying state of the art acoustic receivers and oceanographic monitoring equipment in all of the world’s five oceans in order to examine the local-to-global movements of tagged fish such as sharks, sturgeon, eels, and tuna.

In that context, the objectives of the “Fish Migration and OTN” symposium are two-fold:

- to bring together people who are planning to use, or could benefit from acoustic tracking and co-located oceanographic data from the Ocean Tracking Network

- to discuss and improve our understanding of fish behaviour while migrating, more specifically the way they orientate and navigate, the recent advances in tracking methods as well as the linkage between biology and physical oceanography.

We thus invite contributions from observation studies as well as modeling studies on the topics highlighted below.