What acoustic telemetry can and can’t tell us about fish biology

Abstract

Acoustic telemetry (AT) has become ubiquitous in aquatic monitoring and fish biology, conservation and management. Since the early use of active ultrasonic tracking that required researchers to follow at a distance their species of interest, the field has diversified considerably with exciting advances in both hydrophone and transmitter technology. Once a highly specialised methodology however, AT is fast becoming a generalist tool for those wishing study or conserve fishes, leading to diversifying application by non-specialists. With this transition in mind, we evaluate exactly what AT has become useful for, discussing how the technological and analytical advances around AT can address important questions within fish biology. In doing so, we highlight the key ecological and applied research areas where AT continues to reveal crucial new insight, and in particular, when combined with complimentary research approaches. We aim to provide a comprehensive breakdown of the state of the art for the field of AT, discussing the ongoing challenges, where its strengths lie, and how future developments may revolutionise fisheries management, behavioural ecology and species protection. Through selected papers we illustrate specific applications across the broad spectrum of fish biology. By bringing together the recent and future developments in this field under categories designed to broadly capture many aspects of fish biology, we hope to offer a useful guide for the non-specialist practitioner as they attempt to navigate the dizzying array of considerations and ongoing developments within this diverse toolkit.

Academic English Language Needs Assessment: The Case of Undergraduate Engineering Students at Hawassa University

“…Adding independent, converging motivation for a shift towards analytic, e.g., task-based, syllabuses of some kind, a variety of studies have suggested that it is often not lack of linguistic competence per se that renders learners unable to perform adequately at work or on an overseas university course. Rather, it is learners' inability to accomplish the tasks required of them, for which language use is often highly differentiated and both field-and context-specific, and for which much more than L2 linguistic knowledge is needed (see, e.g., Bosher & Smalkoski, 2002;Jacobson, 1986;Jacoby, 1999;Long, 2005Long, , 2015.…”