Document Type

Article

Publication Title

PLOS ONE

Abstract

As modern fishery assessments change in an effort to be more accurate and encompass the range of potential ecosystem interactions, critical information on the ecology of species including life history, intra and inter-specific competitive interactions and habitat requirements must be added to the standard fishery-dependent and independent data sets. One species whose movements and habitat associations greatly affects exploitation patterns is lingcod, Ophiodon elongatus, which support an economically important fishery along the coastal waters of the Pacific Coast of North America. High site fidelity and limited movements within nearshore areas are hypothesized to have resulted in high catchability, a major factor that has contributed to overfished stocks. Thus, assessing the level of movement and connectivity among lingcod subpopulations inhabiting nearshore habitats is a prerequisite to determining the condition of lingcod stocks. We used the Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking (POST) Project acoustic receiver array in Alaska's Prince William Sound to monitor movements and residency of 21 acoustic-tagged lingcod for up to 16 months. Eight of sixteen lingcod (50%) initially aged at 2.5- to 3.5- years-old dispersed from their tag site. Dispersal was highly seasonal, occurring in two, five-week periods from mid-December through January and from mid-April through May. Dispersal in winter may be related to sexually immature lingcod or newly-mature male lingcod being displaced by territorial males. Spring dispersal may be indicative of the onset of migratory behavior where lingcod move out into Prince William Sound and possibly the offshore waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Our results reveal a pattern of ontogenetic dispersal as lingcod approach 4-years-old and exceed 50 cm total length. The large proportion of tagged fish migrating out of Port Gravina, their tagging site, reflects a high level of connectivity among Prince William Sound subpopulations. Our results also support the hypotheses that these subpopulations may be highly susceptible to overfishing because most fish show long residence times.

First Page

1

Last Page

7

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0014267

Publication Date

12-13-2010

Department

Marine and Environmental Sciences

Comments

Must use original publisher's citation to cite this work.

© 2010 Bishop et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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