Dispersed coral reef fish make their way home to spawn

Coral reef fish hatchlings dispersed by ocean currents are able to make their way back to their home reefs again to spawn, a new study conducted by an international team of Australian, French and American scientists has revealed.

Washington, May 4 : Coral reef fish hatchlings dispersed by ocean currents are able to make their way back to their home reefs again to spawn, a new study conducted by an international team of Australian, French and American scientists has revealed.

The researchers used a novel tagging method to track two populations of fish in a marine protected area in Papua New Guinea. The species included the orange, black and white reef-dwelling clownfish made famous in the movie "Finding Nemo".

The scientists tagged the two fish species, the clownfish (Amphiprion percula) and the vagabond butterflyfish (Chaetodon vagabundus), at a reef surrounding a small island, Kimbe Island, within a recently designated Marine Protected Area in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea, and followed them.

They found that the young of both species made it back to their home reef about 60 percent of the time - a surprising result for fish larvae that had dispersed from a small reef habitat into a large area.

"If we understand how fish larvae disperse, it will enable better design of marine protected areas, and this will help in the rebuilding of threatened fish populations," said Almany, lead author of the study.

According to him, the techniques used in this study can reveal the extent to which fish populations on separate reefs are isolated breeding populations, or connected by fish movements (known as 'connectivity').

"Such information is also critical to effective management of reef fish populations," he said.

The findings appear in the journal Science.

ANI