Should I stay or should I go (home)?

21 September 2021. The team is investigating the homing ability of the goldsinny wrasse, a territorial reef fish that performs relatively short winter migrations from shallow to deeper water. In September, a team from IMR (Kim Halvorsen, Torkel Larsen, Even Moland and Esben Moland Olsen) and the University of Agder (Lars Korslund) surgically implanted telemetry tags in 60 goldsinny wrasse. Half of them where translocated to a new site separated from their home by 400 meters of deep, sub-optimal habitat. The fish will be tracked for 3 months within a fine-scale array of acoustic receivers deployed in the bay. Our earlier pilot studies have shown that about 20% home successfully, so a key question is what happens to the others – do they settle in their new site or do they get eaten on the way back? Another key question is how do they find their way? Stay tuned for the answers!