Arlington,
Virginia — A new paper gives conservation practitioners unprecedented
access to species-specific information to use in the design and
monitoring of tropical no-take
marine reserves. Scientists with The Nature Conservancy and several
partner organizations (the Australian Research Council Centre of
Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, the Coastal Conservation and
Education Foundation, the Laboratoire d’Excellence ‘CORAIL’, The
University of Hawaii at Hilo, Silliman University and the University of
Queensland) reviewed and analyzed movement patterns of 34 families (210
species) of coral reef fishes.
“Synthesizing
this information allows us, for the first time, to provide
recommendations regarding the configuration (size, spacing and location)
of no-take marine reserves
(also known as fisheries closures or replenishment areas) to maximize
their benefits for coral reef fisheries management and biodiversity
protection,” said Alison Green, senior marine scientist in the Asia
Pacific program at The Nature Conservancy.
Well-Designed Marine Reserves
How
local populations of fish species are connected to one another is a key
ecological factor to consider in marine reserve network design. For
marine reserves to protect
biodiversity and enhance fisheries outside their boundaries, they must
be able to sustain focal species within their boundaries, and be spaced
such that they are mutually replenishing and provide spillover of adults
and larval to fished areas. As a result,
the configuration (size, spacing and location) of individual reserves
within a network should be informed by larval dispersal and movement
patterns of the species for which protection is required. In the past,
empirical data on larval dispersal and movement
patterns of adults and juveniles of many tropical marine species have
been unavailable or inaccessible to practitioners responsible for marine
reserve design.
 |
| Photo: Trina Leberer |
Results and Implications
This
review of movement patterns of 34 families (210 species) of coral reef
fishes demonstrates that movement patterns (home ranges, ontogenetic
shifts and spawning migrations)
vary among and within species, and are influenced by a range of factors
(e.g., size, sex, behavior, density, habitat characteristics, season,
tide and time of day). Some species move <0.1–0.5 km (e.g.
damselfishes, butterflyfishes and angelfishes), <0.5–3
km (e.g. most parrotfishes, goatfishes and surgeonfishes) or 3–10 km
(e.g. large parrotfishes and wrasses), while others move tens to
hundreds (e.g. some groupers, emperors, snappers and jacks) or thousands
of kilometers (e.g. some sharks and tuna). Larval
dispersal distances tend to be <5–15 km, and self-recruitment is
common. The recommendations from this paper are:
·
Marine reserves should be more than twice
the size of the home range of focal species (in all directions), thus
marine reserves of various sizes will be required depending on which
species require protection, how far they move
and if other effective protection is in place outside reserves; · Reserve spacing should be < 15 km, with smaller reserves spaced more closely; and
· Marine reserves should include habitats that are critical to the life history of focal species (e.g., home ranges, nursery grounds, migration corridors and spawning aggregations), and be located to accommodate movement patterns among these.
“We
also provide practical advice for practitioners about how to use this
information to design, evaluate and monitor the effectiveness of marine
reserve networks within
broader ecological, socioeconomic and management contexts,” added
Rebecca Weeks, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian Research
Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.
This
paper is the latest in a series of scientific reviews to provide
ecological guidelines for improving the benefits of tropical marine
protected areas for fisheries management
and biodiversity in the face of climate change all of which are
available at:
www.coraltriangleinitiative.