Innovative Tagging Technique May Help Researchers Better Protect Fish Stocks

Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are often hailed as a way to halt serious declines in the abundance of marine species that have been over-fished. But even as nations begin to set aside protected parcels of ocean for marine reserves, the effectiveness of the approach as a fisheries management tool remains unclear. Simon Thorrold, a fish ecologist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), would like to put MPAs to the test with a novel technique for tagging fish. Through a new research grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Thorrold and colleagues plan to use harmless chemical tags to track the dispersal of the larvae of coral reef fishes in the western Pacific Ocean. The Packard Foundationus Conservation and Science Program has granted Thorrold and colleagues more than $480,000 for three years to study the population dynamics of grouper and snapper in the waters around the Great Barrier Reef and Papua New Guinea...