Foragers must often travel from a central place to exploit aggregations of prey. These patches can be identified behaviorally when a forager shifts from travel to area restricted search, identified by a decrease in speed and an increase in sinuosity of movement. Faster, more directed movement is associated with travel. Differentiating foraging behavior at patches from travel to patches is important for a variety of research questions and has now been made easier by the advent of small, GPS devices that can track forager movement with high resolution. In the summer and fall of 2012, movement data were collected from GPS devices placed on foraging trips originating in the artisanal fishing village of Desa Ikan (pseudonym), on the east coast of the Caribbean island nation of the Commonwealth Dominica. Moored FADs are human-made structures anchored to the ocean floor with fish attraction material on or near the surface designed to effectively create a resource patch. The ultimate goal of the research is to understand how property rights are emerging after the introduction of fish aggregating device (FAD) technology at the site in 1999. This paper reports on research to identify area-restricted search foraging behavior at FAD patches. For 22 foraging trips simultaneous behavioral observations were made to ground-truth the GPS movement data. Using a cumulative sum method, area restricted search was identified as negative deviations from the mean travel speed and the method was able to correctly identify FAD patches in every case.
We used global positioning system (GPS) technology and tracking analysis to measure fishing effort by marine, small-scale, fish aggregating device (FAD) fishers of the Commonwealth of Dominica. FADs are humanmade structures designed to float on the surface of the water and attract fish. They are also prone to common pool resource problems. To identify free riders with respect to specific FADs, we need to compare the cost expended for FAD construction versus the benefit fishers extract from their use of the FADs. From August to December 2012, we placed GPS devices on a sample of fishing trips to track movement and measure Downloaded from variation in fishers' fishing efforts at a set of seven FADs off the Atlantic east coast of central Dominica. The method produces high-resolution data to determine how much time different fishers use different FADs.
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