Better Understanding through Detailed Behavior: A New Marine Telemetry System to Monitor Fine-Scale Movement and Behavior

For marine animals with high-site fidelity and small home ranges, the design of Marine Protected Areas must account for the fine-scale habitat features selected by these animals. A new marine acoustic telemetry system was developed that allows us to monitor the behavior, movement, and resource selection by mobile animals while reducing localization errors to less than 1 m.

Copper rockfish (Sebastes caurinus), a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife designated ‘indicator species’, was selected for the field trials of this system. Their high site-fidelity and small home ranges provide ample opportunity to track individual fish behavior while testing our ability to characterize the movements of a species of interest to management authorities. To evaluate the use of acoustic telemetry for investigating the behavioral responses of the fish to the fine-scale, three-dimensional features of their environment, a high-resolution, photomosaic mapping survey of the seafloor will supplement the telemetry study.