Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2013. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Springer for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Coral Reefs 32 (2013): 1123-1134, doi:10.1007/s00338-013-1069-2.
Description:
Acoustic telemetry is an increasingly common tool for studying the movement patterns, behaviour, and site
fidelity of marine organisms, but to accurately interpret acoustic data, the variability, periodicity and range of
detectability between acoustic tags and receivers must be understood. The relative and interactive effects of
topography with biological and environmental noise have not been quantified on coral reefs. We conduct two
long-term range tests (one and four months duration) on two different reef types in the central Red Sea, to
determine the relative effect of distance, depth, topography, time of day, wind, lunar phase, sea surface
temperature and thermocline on detection probability. Detectability, as expected, declines with increasing
distance between tags and receivers, and we find average detection ranges of 530 and 120 m, using V16 and V13
tags respectively, but the topography of the reef can significantly modify this relationship, reducing the range by
~70%, even when tags and receivers are in line-of-sight. Analyses that assume a relationship between distance
and detections must therefore be used with care. Nighttime detection range was consistently reduced in both
locations and detections varied by lunar phase in the four month test, suggesting a strong influence of biological
noise (reducing detection probability up to 30%), notably more influential than other environmental noises,
including wind-driven noise, which is normally considered important in open-water environments. Analysis of
detections should be corrected in consideration of the diel patterns we find, and range tests or sentinel tags
should be used for more than one month to quantify potential changes due to lunar phase. Some studies assume
that the most usual factor limiting detection range is weather-related noise; this cannot be extrapolated to coral
reefs.
Description:
2014-08-19
Keywords:
Passive monitoring
;
Acoustic transmitters
;
Detection efficiency
;
Saudi Arabia
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Preprint
Format:
application/pdf
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