Using Otolith Elemental Composition to Track the Habitat Use, Movements, and Life History Patterns of Common Snook (Centropomus undecimalis) and Red Drum (Sciaenops ocellatus) in the Tampa Bay Estuary

• Main Author: Rolls, Holly Jacqueline
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: Digital Commons @ University of South Florida 2014
• Subjects: estuarine habitat; natural tags; otolith chemistry; Aquaculture and Fisheries; Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Red drum; Sciaenops ocellatus
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/5298; https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/context/etd/article/6494/viewcontent/Rolls_usf_0206D_12507.pdf

Knowledge of fish habitat use and connectivity is critical for understanding the structure and dynamics of fish populations and, therefore, necessary for the implementation of successful fisheries management strategies. Tagging is an effective means of providing such information, and the elemental composition contained within fish otoliths is increasingly being used as a natural tag. The chemical composition of otoliths reflects the incorporation of elements from different water bodies and can thus be used to understand the habitat use, movements, and life history patterns of fishes. To assess the applicability of otolith elemental composition as a tagging technique within the Tampa Bay estuary, Florida, laser ablation-inductively coupled-plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) was used to analyze the elemental composition of otoliths from two estuarine-dependent fish species, Snook (Centropomus undecimalis) and Red Drum (Sciaenops ocellatus). Otolith elemental fingerprints can be used to quantify the proportion of juveniles from different nurseries that survive to join the sub-adult and adult fisheries, thus, providing resource managers with quantitative criteria to prioritize the most productive areas for conservation and restoration. To evaluate the use of otolith elemental fingerprinting in the Tampa Bay estuary, the spatial and temporal scales of chemical variation in otoliths collected from throughout Tampa Bay were examined by performing permutation-based multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA) on the elemental data at several spatial (individual tributary, two-region, and three-region) and temporal (annual and seasonal) scales. Canonical Analysis of Principal Coordinates (CAP) was used to generate classifiers based on the otolith elemental fingerprints of juvenile fish, and `leave-one-out' cross-validation procedures indicated that the greatest classification accuracy was obtained by using the two-region model (upper vs. lower Tampa Bay) for both species (for Snook F=45.8, p=0.001, CAP cross-validation ...