Marine protected areas (MPAs) are increasing in popularity as a tool to manage fish stocks through conservation of entire habitats and fish assemblages. Quantifying the habitat use, site fidelity, and movement patterns of marine species is vital to this method of marine spatial planning. The success of these protected areas requires that sufficient habitat is guarded against fishing pressure. For large animals, which often have correspondingly large home range areas, protecting an entire home range can be logistically challenging. For MPAs to successfully protect large top predator species, it is important to understand what areas of a home range are especially important, such as breeding and feeding grounds. New technologies, such as acoustic telemetry, have made it possible to track marine animal movements at finer spatial and temporal scales than previously possible, better illuminating these spatial use patterns. This study focused on the movement patterns of great barracuda (n=35), an ecologically important top predator, around Buck Island Reef National Monument, a no-take MPA in St. Croix, U.S.V.I. managed by the National Park Service. As developing standardized methods for acoustic telemetry is still a work in progress, the first half of this study focuses on determining appropriate tools for generating home range size estimates for great barracuda and analyzing ecological parameters driving these results. The second half of this study focused on the use of network analysis to look at spatial divisions within individual home ranges and to compare individual to population level spatial patterns, as well as to generate a relative estimate of population density within the park. Barracuda within the park demonstrated high site fidelity to individual territories, but at the population level they consistently used all habitats within the array. Core use areas within home ranges were evenly distributed throughout all habitats monitored by the acoustic array, although movement corridors were detected along high rugosity reef structures. Greater population densities within the park indicate that density dependent behaviors may be influencing habitat use within the park, and suggest that barracuda are contributing high levels of top down pressure through predation within the park boundaries.

This study examined the effects of the January 2010 cold spell on mangrove utilizing coral reef fishes off the southeast coast of Florida, USA, in the vicinity of Biscayne National Park (BNP). An ongoing, fishery-independent mangrove visual survey documenting fish assemblages in BNP provided data from the years 1998 to 2014 for examination. Of particular interest were the presence, abundance, and size structure for five mangrove utilizing coral reef fishes: sergeant major (Abudefduf saxatilis), yellowfin mojarra (Gerres cinereus), schoolmaster snapper (Lutjanus apodus), gray snapper (Lutjanus griseus), and great barracuda (Sphyraena barracuda). These species were selected for analysis due to their economic and ecologic importance, their potential as environmental indicators, their connectedness to multiple habitats, and their abundance within the available data set. Data were collected using a modified visual ‘belt transect’ method, consisting of 60 m2 transects running parallel to the mangrove shorelines. Data for average length of fish were reconstructed to form standard normal distributions and the resulting lengths were assigned to various age-classes to create species-specific length-frequency distributions. Variations in presence and abundance were examined across three time periods (1998-2009; 2010-2011; 2012-2014), as well as comparisons of length-frequency distributions. Following the January 2010 cold spell, the presence and abundance values for the two years immediately following the event were significantly decreased compared to the years prior to the cold spell for most of the five species at either mainland (ML) or leeward key (LK) locations. Additionally, the presence and abundance estimates typically remained statistically decreased when compared against the remaining years in the available data set. The size structures for the majority of the five species at either location, however, were not consistently significantly different between the three time periods, as was hypothesized. Instead, the analyses showed mixed results, with the size structure typically shifting towards smaller individuals immediately following the event. These findings suggest that drops in water temperature resulting from cold spells are capable of directly impacting mangrove utilizing reef fish species, albeit to varying degrees depending on various factors, such as physiological tolerances, ecological life history strategies, and habitat requirements.