Bonefish do not respect international borders: the Florida–Bahamas connection

Abstract

Migratory connectivity of marine fishes is difficult to quantify yet critical for effective species management. Anchor tagging and acoustic telemetry tracking projects on bonefish (Albula vulpes), an economically important coastal exploited species, discovered three bonefish that moved from coastal waters of the Florida Keys to Andros Island, Bahamas. The anchor tagging project had two bonefish make this Florida–Bahamas movement and the acoustic telemetry project had one bonefish make this movement. Outlier analysis was done on the linear distance of these three Florida–Bahamas movements compared to the linear distances of bonefish tagged and recaptured in Florida waters. Also, comparisons were made between the mean distances between tagging locations and mean distances between recapture locations to evaluate whether relocations were active or passive. The linear distance analysis determined the three Florida–Bahamas movements were not outliers. Second, the mean distance between the tagging locations in Florida coastal waters (111 km; 95% CI 63.7–158.4 km) and the mean distance between recapture locations in Andros Island coastal waters (30 km; 95% CI 25.0–35.0 km) may suggest that these relocations are not random dispersal. This paper provides evidence that bonefish can make long distance movements (> 100 km) over deep water (> 200 m). This evidence suggests the need for more research to evaluate the potential for connectivity between neighboring nations for bonefish.