Behavior, activity budgets, and prey consumption of temperate reef fish communities in Patagonia.

JAVIER CIANCIO

Mar del Plata

Workshop; CAIMAR kick off meeting; 2017

mincyt

The energybudget for a specimen includes the energy required for covering metabolicneeds, somatic growth, gamete production, and movement. The energy spent inmoving may represent a significant fraction of its total energy budget, and thecapacity to quantify properly the time engaged in different activities andenergetic costs is crucial to understand both the ecology and behavior of agiven species. Different techniques were applied to study activity patterns andenergy consumption in fishes kept in captivity where fishes are forced to swim.However, conditions in the wild can be rarely reproduced in laboratory. The useof tri-axial accelerometers to monitor locomotion and for estimating energyconsumption based expanded greatly in recent years. The dynamic component ofthe acceleration, which is related to the animal movement, probed to be anexcellent proxy for energy consumption in fishes. This fine scale movementdescription, coupled with long term acoustic home range and movement monitoring,provides the ideal scenario to study reef fish ecology. The rocky reef fish assemblage from Northern Patagonia (NP),Argentina, composed by about 29 bony fishes, sustains important recreationaland commercial activities like scuba diving, and hook-and-line and spear-fishing.Despite this, this system has been largely unattended by conservation andfisheries authorities. In the present project, we provided a framework for oneof the primary needs, which is to understand the demands of food or energy of areef community in order to establish areas to protect to ensure its health.