Abstract
Marine reserves can protect fish populations by increasing abundance and body size, but less is known about the effect of protection on fish behaviour. We looked for individual consistency in movement behaviours of sea trout in the marine habitat using acoustic telemetry to investigate whether they represent personality traits and if so, do they affect survival in relation to protection offered by a marine reserve. Home range size had a repeatability of 0.21, suggesting that it represents a personality trait, while mean swimming depth, activity and diurnal vertical migration were not repeatable movement behaviours. The effect of home range size on survival differed depending on the proportion of time fish spent in the reserve, where individuals spending more time in the reserve experienced a decrease in survival with larger home ranges while individuals spending little time in the reserve experienced an increase in survival with larger home ranges. We suggest that the diversity of fish home range sizes could be preserved by establishing networks of marine reserves encompassing different habitat types, ensuring both a heterogeneity in environmental conditions and fishing pressure.
Highlights
Fishing-induced evolution and the consequences for populations have been extensively documented (Kuparinen & Festa-Bianchet, 2017)
Sea trout revealed individual consistency in home range size over a period of several months or even years, reflecting that home range can be considered an aspect of personality
We found that home range size affecwted survival, and this relationship differed depending on the proportion of time the fish spent inside the reserve
Summary
Fishing-induced evolution and the consequences for populations have been extensively documented (Kuparinen & Festa-Bianchet, 2017). Different behavioural strategies will be favoured in response to changes in a range of environmental variables, including food availability, population density and predator density, which is an important aspect in understanding their maintenance (Dingemanse & Réale, 2013). Studies on repeatability of behaviour generally have been conducted in the laboratory, but more recently researchers have investigated repeatability of spatial behavioural traits in the wild (Harrison et al, 2014; Villegas-Ríos et al, 2017) Such studies are important for understanding how behavioural variation is maintained in nature, which in turn may provide useful input to adapting conservation strategies. It is important to understand how selection may differ between harvested and protected areas and to what degree marine reserves may help in maintaining the behavioural diversity within populations, which represent resilience to environmental change (Dingemanse et al, 2004). We further hypothesized that selection on trout behaviour would differ between fished and protected areas
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