Movement Ecology of Lobster Fisheries
Summary
The movement ecology of lobster fisheries examines how individual and population‐level movements of lobsters influence their availability to fishing gear, resilience to harvest and responses to environmental change. Research spans fine‐scale foraging excursions around baited traps to broad seasonal migrations between nursery, foraging and breeding grounds. Key drivers include water temperature, currents and olfactory cues from bait plumes, all of which shape home range size and site fidelity. Understanding these patterns has direct implications for stock assessment, spatial management and the design of marine protected areas. Advances in telemetry and mark–recapture methods have revealed high individual variability in movement strategies, with larger lobsters typically exhibiting greater displacement. Integrating movement data with catch‐per‐unit‐effort metrics refines estimates of population density and improves predictions of fishing impact, thereby supporting sustainable harvest and adaptive management globally.
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Movement Ecology of Lobster Fisheries publication trend
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Technical terms
Telemetry: Remote tracking of animal movements using electronic tags (acoustic, radio or data storage) that record location over time.
Home range: The area regularly traversed by an individual for feeding, shelter and mating.
Site fidelity: The tendency of an individual to return to or remain within a particular area over time.
Catch‐per‐unit‐effort (CPUE): A standardised index of relative abundance based on the number of lobsters caught per trap or fishing effort unit.
Bait plume: A dispersal of dissolved chemical cues from bait that lobsters detect and follow to locate traps.
References
- Tracking movements of decapod crustaceans: a review of a half-century of telemetry-based studies. Marine Ecology Progress Series (2021).
- Movement patterns of a commercially important, free-ranging marine invertebrate in the vicinity of a bait source. Animal Biotelemetry (2018).
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