Spatial ecology of Norway lobster Nephrops norvegicus in Mediterranean deep-water environments: implications for designing no-take marine reserves

16 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables, supplementary material https://www.int-res.com/articles/suppl/m674p173_supp/

The Norway lobster Nephrops norvegicus is one of the most important marine resources for European fisheries. However, overfishing has caused the stocks to decline over the last decades, particularly in the Mediterranean Sea. The implementation of no-take marine reserves could change these current trends, thus achieving a more sustainable fishery. The effectiveness of no-take reserves depends on optimal size design, and because of this, new behavioural data on the spatial ecology of the species are of pivotal importance. Here, for the first time, we investigated the spatial movements and daily activity patterns of Norway lobster in a deep-water (315-475 m depth) no-take marine reserve of 10 km2 in the continental slope of the northwestern Mediterranean Sea, by combining acoustic tracking and tagging-recapture procedures. The results revealed the territorial behaviour of Norway lobster, centred in small exclusive individual areas where most displacements took place at midday. We found that once settled in a place, their home ranges reached approximate sizes of 17.75 to 736.25 m2, suggesting that no-take marine areas focussed on recovering Norway lobster populations do not require large extents to be effective. Tag-recapture data indicated minimal spillover of biomass, implying that Norway lobsters are site settled and do not perform large movements. Future studies on larval spread and recruitment would be necessary to focus on the possible spillover benefit for fisheries. The acoustic telemetry system used in the present experiment effectively revealed the range of movement of individuals, and thus represents a promising monitoring tool to assess no-take marine reserve sizes and reciprocal spacing for deep-water demersal resources

M.V. was supported by a predoctoral fellowship of the FPU program of the Spanish Government (FPU18/01775). J.N. was funded by the Spanish National Program Ramón y Cajal (RYC-2015-17809), Ministry of Science and Innovation, Spain. I.M. was funded by a MSCA-IF-GF (ID:893089, H2020-EU.1.3.2, European Commission) and received financial support from the project SASES (RTI2018-095112-B-I00). This work was developed in the framework of the Joint Research Unit Tecnoterra (ICM-CSIC and UPC). The results reported herein arose from the project RESNEP (CTM2017-82991-C2-1-R), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Spain. This work acknowledges the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S)

Peer reviewed