David Hallock Secor - Migration Ecology of Marine Fishes

Migration Ecology of Marine Fishes

David Hallock Secor

2015 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2015

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Johns Hopkins University Press

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Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Secor, David H., 1960

Migration ecology of marine fishes / David Hallock Secor.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4214-1612-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4214-1613-7 (electronic) ISBN 1-4214-1612-3

(hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 1-4214-1613-1 (electronic)

1. Marine fishesMigration. 2. FishesMigration. I. Title.

QL639.5.S43 2015

597.1568dc23 2014018367

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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To my dad, and his example of contemplative scholarship

Chapter 1
Introduction: The Hidden Lives of Marine Fish

Chapter 2
Bird and Fish Migration: Movement Ecology as a Comparative Framework

Chapter 3
Mating Systems and Larval Dispersal

Chapter 4
Complex Life Cycles and Marine Food Webs: Migrating through Size Spectra

Chapter 5
Population Structure: Closed and Open Life Cycles

Chapter 6
Propagating Propensities: Partial Migration

Chapter 7
Resilience: Contingents for Contingencies

Vince Burke, executive editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, asked me several years ago, Why not write a book? Years earlier, my then-5-year-old son posed a similar question: Moms running marathons. Why dont you? Unfortunately, endurance running and writing cannot be sustained by the why not motivation. My motivation to write this book was largely selfisha chance to sit in quiet scholarship and try to make sense of an era of discovery on fish migration. My career (1983present) spans the information age, which has generated a flood of empirical and modeling advances during a period of strong public and private support for marine science. We now find ourselves in the happy dilemma of being deluged in discovery. My goal was to sample recent discoveries and place them into common themes related to life cycle diversity. The inspiration came from my dog-eared volume of Fish Migration, a thesis on the life cycles of marine fishes written by F. R. Harden Jones more than 40 years ago. Could I build on where Harden Jones left off?

I wrote most of this book at the James P. Muldoon River Center at St. Marys College of Maryland, hosted by Bob Paul and the Department of Biology. Chesapeake Biological Laboratory Directors Margaret Palmer and Tom Miller and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science President Don Boesch were quite supportive in accommodating periodic absences to work on the book. I am indebted to the members of my laboratory over the past several years, who have endured my frequent absences. In particular, Alex Atkinson, Ben Gahagan, Mike OBrien, and Matt Siskey have helped hold down the fort. Librarian Kathy Heil kept me out of hoc with late-returned books, and Mike OBrien obligingly put together most of the maps appearing in the volume. Sara Rains provided fish and bird artwork appearing in ).

Lots of contemplative quiet hours at St. Marys College may sound a bit lonely, but in fact there was a constant din of voices from colleagues as I visited (or revisited) their work. I am privileged to work amidst an incredibly active and prolific cohort of scientists, whose enthusiasm for unraveling the hidden lives of marine fishes is inspiring. I have tried to listen to what they have had to say and hope that I have given their voices due reflection. Most influential, however, were my own former students: Lisa Kerr, Richard Kraus, Edwin Niklitschek, and Ryan Woodland. The daily interactions of supervising them as past PhD students have opened doors, heightened my awareness, and helped me witness new discoveries that I would have otherwise missed. Likewise, many friends and colleagues have helped shape this book. Foremost in motivating me were book writers Ken Able and John Waldman, who provided large footsteps to follow. Influential conversations (albeit during sometimes brief interactions) shaped this book, including those with Ken Able, Andy Bakun, Steve Berkeley, Barbara Block, Denise Breitburg, Deirdre Brophy, Steve Cadrin, Greg Cailliet, Steve Campana, John Casselman, Dave Conover, Ad Corten, Chuck Coutant, Bob Cowen, John Mark Dean, Julian Dodson, Dewayne Fox, Jean-Marc Fromentin, John Graves, Mart Gross, Sharon Herzka, Robert Humston, Karin Limburg, Molly Lutcavage, John Manderson, Jim McCleave, Ian McQuinn, Tom Miller, John Neilson, John Olney, Pierre Petitgas, Adrian Rijnsdorp, Alexei Sharov, Mike Sinclair, Susan Sogard, Masaru Tanaka, Katsumi Tsukamoto, Bob Ulanowicz, John Waldman, Paul Webb, and Mike Wilberg. I am particularly grateful to my long-term collaborators Ed Houde and Jay Rooker for their friendships, unique takes on the world, and abiding support of my scientific pursuits.

Finally, I thank my nature-enthusiast mom and wife, Eriko, who understands all about endurance sports.

Migration Ecology of Marine Fishes

Animal migration is a phenomenon far grander and more patterned than animal movement. It represents collective travel with long-deferred rewards. It suggests premeditation and epic willfulness, codified as inherited instinct.

David Quammen (2010)

Imagine the clandestine lives of marine fishestheir migrations, affinity for habitat, social interactions, and pursuit of preyall obscured below the seas oft-opaque surface. The lives of marine fishes have long inspired frustration, wonder, and creative impulse among naturalists, fishermen, scientists, and writers. Two generations ago, visionaries Jacques Cousteau, Rachel Carson, and Eugenie Clark dramatically expanded our view of the dynamic seascapes and the fish that inhabit them. Their technical and literary breakthroughs, passion and creativity generated a wave of public enthusiasm for undersea exploration and catalyzed a generation of marine scientists dedicated to making seascapes and the lives of marine fishes ever more overt. The result is an unprecedented period of discovery arising from advances in ocean observing systems, in methods to track individual fish movements, and in computing and telecommunications systems designed to detect, summarize, and simulate fish migrations. The Census of Marine Life is but one, albeit grand, example: a 10-y program (19902000) of exploration resulting in hundreds of expeditions, >6,000 new species descriptions, and countless newly described fish migrations and life cycles (Snelgrove 2010).