coasts. It then trekked back to the Yucatan exactly one year later. Our PSAT tag popped off 18 miles (29 kilometers) from where this sailfish was originally tagged! This sailfish definitely knew where it was going- as if it has its own GPS and Google Maps. Yes! Without a smartphone.
But that’s not all we learned. Sailfish feed around the Yucatan in the late winter and spring and then go off on yearlong migration or “road trips” to various productive coastal regions in the West Atlantic, including to a region off the Northeast coast of Brazil. One sailfish journeyed to Brazil, some 2962 miles (4768 kilometers) away, and eventually returned to the Isla Mujeres region and was again, within 180 miles (300 kilometers) from where it had been tagged the year before.
You have got to see this migration to believe it!
When we have such a detailed collection of movement data from multiple individuals, we are able to assemble a bigger picture of where sailfish would be in space and time. Without diving too deeply into the details, here are the highlights of our study:
-Sailfish undertook seasonal, cyclic migrations that connect productive coastal areas along the West Atlantic
-Dispersal patterns from satellite and conventional tags are similar
-Sailfish movement is not as restrictive as results from conventional tags had previously suggested
-Future: we will need to establish connectivity of sailfish from coastal areas to the offshore Central Atlantic
To learn more
There is a lot more than what we can cover in this introductory article, so if you are interested in learning more about our work, it’s best to go read our published paper. It’s in the public domain and free for everyone, so please distribute and spread the word on our new and exciting findings. You will find all the fancy figures and supplementary materials here:
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep38163
For more information please click here.
Photo captions in order of appearance: 1: Lilly Mendillo of Keen M International checking on a recently tagged sailfish. Credit: George Schellenger. Isla Mujeres 3. Hard at work in the field. From the top: Dr Molly fought to bring in a sailfish. Once you have reeled it in, you have to move fast to do the tagging and sampling. That includes cutting a very tiny piece of the fin for genetic analysis and taking measurement on the sailfish’s length. After all that is done, the whole team is always very pumped up and excited that we have accomplished another successful release. As you can see we’re a diverse team: women scientists and a multi-national crew. Credit: Anthony Mendillo/Large Pelagics Research Center 4. Credit: Anthony Mendillo/Large Pelagics Research Center
January 2017 - Stories from the Sea
96 - SEVENSEAS