PRE2023-Behavioural complexity in sharks and rays-PID2022-139921OA-I00

Human dependence on marine resources is beyond any doubt. The importance of fish as food and for jobs has resulted in long-term overfishing of global fish stocks. However, fish populations, especially in coastal areas, face multiple threats beyond fishing, such as habitat loss and degradation or climate change. Investigating how individuals behave in the wild is key to understanding responses to all these threats and the effectiveness of management measures. Conservation behaviour studies have largely focused on average, population-level measures of behaviour, ignoring potential variation among individuals in the same population despite the key role of individual variation in behaviour in explaining processes such as individual fitness, population connectivity and genetic structure, or ecosystem-level nutrient dynamics. Individual variation in behaviour may also drive variation in responses to protection and spatial conservation measures resulting in unanticipated ecological and evolutionary consequences. Besides behaviour is subject to constant change due to environmental or human related effects. The degree to which individuals vary in their responses to those changes and how social structure re-organizes after a perturbation remains largely unexplored. In this PhD the candidate will investigate overlooked levels of behavioural variation and explore how they can be used to boost the conservation of fish populations. We will do so using coastal elasmobranchs as study case.