Population assessment of tropical tuna based on their associative behavior around floating objects.

Estimating the abundance of pelagic fish species is a challenging task, due to their vast and remote habitat. Despite the development of satellite, archival and acoustic tagging techniques that allow the tracking of marine animals in their natural environments, these technologies have so far been underutilized in developing abundance estimations. We developed a new method for estimating the abundance of tropical tuna that employs these technologies and exploits the aggregative behavior of tuna around floating objects (FADs). We provided estimates of abundance indices based on a simulated set of tagged fish and studied the sensitivity of our method to different association dynamics, FAD numbers, population sizes and heterogeneities of the FAD-array. Taking the case study of yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) acoustically-tagged in Hawaii, we implemented our approach on field data and derived for the first time the ratio between the associated and the total population. With more extensive and long-term monitoring of FAD-associated tunas and good estimates of the numbers of fish at FADs, our method could provide fisheries-independent estimates of populations of tropical tuna. The same approach can be applied to obtain population assessments for any marine and terrestrial species that display associative behavior and from which behavioral data have been acquired using acoustic, archival or satellite tags.

Amino acid profiles and liposomes: Their role as chemosensory information carriers in the marine environment.

Yellowfin tuna enhance their hunting success in the vast pelagic environment by using their sense of smell to detect intact (uninjured) prey that are beyond visual range. However, the olfactory cues that tuna use would normally face huge and rapid dilution in the open ocean. We demonstrate that these prey odors are complexed within biologically derived lipid structures that probably delay the dilution of the amino acids to subthreshold concentrations and provide persistent arousal and search cues for the tuna. This may be the first demonstration of an extracorporeal biological function for liposomes. Tuna may also form "chemical search images" to maximize feeding efficiency. We demonstrate that the amino acid profiles of various prey species are consistent over time and between schools, which makes the formation of search images feasible.

Physiological and behavioural thermoregulation in bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus).

Tuna are unique among teleost fishes in being thermoconserving. Vascular counter-current heat exchangers maintain body temperatures above ambient water temperature, thereby improving locomotor muscle efficiency, especially at burst speeds and when pursuing prey below the thermocline. Because tuna also occasionally swim rapidly in warm surface waters, it has been hypothesized that tuna thermoregulate to accommodate changing activity levels or ambient temperatures. But previous field experiments have been unable to demonstrate definitively short-latency, mammalian-type physiological thermoregulation. Here we show using telemetered data that free-ranging bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus) can rapidly alter whole-body thermal conductivity by two orders of magnitude. The heat exchangers are disengaged to allow rapid warming as the tuna ascend from cold water into warmer surface waters, and are reactivated to conserve heat when they return into the depths. Combining physiological and behavioural thermoregulation expands the foraging space of bigeye tuna into otherwise prohibitively cold, deep water.