Fisk, Aaron T

This thesis aimed to address potential sources of bias in electronic fish tagging studies in order to advance the methods used by future studies. I first provided a review and meta-analysis of intracoelomic tagging effects in fishes, summarizing the existing literature and assessing the extent to which previously identified research gaps have been filled. I also included the first large-scale meta-analysis on tagging effects, examining the 2% rule using empirical evidence from a broad representation of all published studies. I then assessed the performance of a newly miniaturized predation-sensing acoustic transmitter (Innovasea V3D), demonstrating that V3D transmitters can mitigate predation biases by correctly identifying most predation events without false positives. I finally examined if immobilization via MS-222 or TENS alters the behaviours of fishes in the wild following tagging, and identified the time required for fish to re-establish normal behaviour following transmitter implantation.

Author Keywords: Acoustic telemetry, Electronic tagging, Fish ecology, Predation, Systematic review, Tagging effects