Movement and home range of pink abalone Haliotis corrugata: implications for restoration and population recovery

Abstract

Densities of abalone in southern California have been dramatically reduced by overfishing and disease, leading to the collapse of some populations, and low fertilization rates may be hindering population recovery. This is a pattern typical of abalone species globally. However, movement may produce clustered distributions that promote fertilization success in broadcast spawners, such as abalone, even at low regional densities. We translocated wild, adult pink abalone Haliotis corrugata to an existing pink abalone patch to create a high-density aggregation, and then used acoustic telemetry to characterize abalone movement and monitor aggregation maintenance for a period of 14 mo in the Point Loma kelp forest near San Diego, California. Abalone showed a minimal flight response to handling that did not differ between the resident or translocated groups. Most individuals exhibited small home ranges (median area 183 m 2 ) and homing behavior consisting of regular back-and-forth movement to a single point. Nomadic movement was also observed in several individuals. Though site fidelity may help maintain aggregations, abalone density decreased, and nearest neighbor distances increased at our site to nearinitial levels after 18 mo via a combination of mortality, large movements of a few individuals, and small, incremental movements of most individuals. No coordinated movements that would suggest spawning behavior were observed. Translocation of wild abalone to produce aggregations may not result in high rates of fertilization success that promote population recovery. However, the homing behavior observed may provide more opportunities for mating than expectations based on static measures of density and aggregation state.

An approach for filtering hyperbolically positioned underwater acoustic telemetry data with position precision estimates

“…Although we present a process for selecting a single fixed HPE cutoff and provide the R code necessary for performing this approach (Additional file 1), a dynamic filter in which the HPE cutoff could be either temporally (e.g., [26]), or both temporally and spatially flexible, might prove useful, although it also would require synchronization tags that match fish tags. Regardless of how the HPE selection process is fine-tuned, the key is following a standard process like the one we have described, including reporting the process for others to properly assess the research findings.…”

Movement patterns of a commercially important, free-ranging marine invertebrate in the vicinity of a bait source

“…Prior to analysis, detections with high positional error were identified using linear regression between two measures of horizontal positioning error (HPE and HPEm) [42,46]. The model was weighted by the number of HPEm observations per whole value of HPE.…”

A groundwater-fed coastal inlet as habitat for the Caribbean queen conch Lobatus gigas—an acoustic telemetry and space use analysis

“…The geographical position of a tagged animal was calculated at a typical accuracy of a few metres by an algorithm based on the difference in time-of-arrival at a minimum of 3 receivers using VEMCO in-house software (VEMCO Positioning System, VPS; Smith 2013; see also Espinoza et al 2011, Coates et al 2013. Data collected from fixed-location synchroniser tags were used to assess the quality of positioning data (Smith 2013; for details of animal position calculation, see Supplement 1 at www.…”

“…A few studies have used direct observation to investigate the movement of small and slowmoving benthic animals such as sea urchins (LauzonGuay et al 2006) and gastropods (Seuront et al 2007, Vannini et al 2008. Recently, acoustic telemetry was used to study home ranges and population connectivity of abalone and octopus species (Sheel & Bisson 2012, Coates et. al 2013.…”