232 
Fishery Bulletin 113(3) 
reach a length of 5-6 cm FL (Leis, 1987; Leis and Lee, 
1994). Crimson jobfish settle and form loose schools 
over featureless soft-bottom habitat at depths of 80- 
100 m (Parrish, 1989). While in their nursery they 
feed on benthic and, to a lesser extent, a mix of plank- 
tonic invertebrates and small nektonic fishes (DeMar- 
tini et ah, 1996; Schumacher, 2011). Survey results 
indicate that slope areas close to sources of coastal 
discharge (e.g., draining embayments or reef chan- 
nels) tend to support greater numbers of juveniles and 
serve as premium habitat or nursery grounds (Parrish 
et al., 1997). These nurseries are important gateways 
in the life history of the crimson jobfish and provide 
a window to understanding and predicting year-class 
fluctuations. 
The most studied nursery ground for crimson jobfish 
in Hawaii is the offshore area of Kaneohe Bay, Oahu. 
Monthly sampling of the juvenile population in this 
area has revealed seasonal patterns in the distribution 
of fish sizes consistent with an annual progression of 
a year class through its recruitment, growth, and emi- 
gration to adult habitats (Moffitt and Parrish, 1996). 
Fish at sizes of 7-10 cm FL appear in this nursery 
habitat in the fall and stay there for a period of 6-7 
months until they reach 20-30 cm FL (Moffitt and Par- 
rish, 1996). Otolith features of juvenile crimson jobfish 
indicate ages of ~6 months for 10.5-cm-FL fish, about 
a year for 18.5-cm-FL fish, and 2 and 3 years, respec- 
tively, for 28.0- and 36.0-cm-FL fish (DeMartini et ah, 
1994; Andrews et ah, 2012). At 2-3 years of age, fish 
begin to emigrate offshore to deeper habitats used by 
subadults (Okamoto 1 ) and adults (Haight et al., 1993a). 
Because only 2 wild juvenile crimson jobfish had been 
tagged and tracked in the Kaneohe nursery (Moffitt 
and Parrish, 1996) before our study, there has been 
insufficient understanding of juvenile crimson jobfish 
movements and how they might compare with those of 
crimson jobfish raised in captivity. 
In this study, we report new observations of 2 batch- 
es of juvenile crimson jobfish that were implanted with 
acoustic tags and released in separate years to the 
nursery habitat off windward Oahu. In the first year 
(2006) of this study, a batch of cultured fish were tagged 
and released, followed by a second year (2007) in which 
wild fish were collected from the nursery, tagged, held 
for observation, and then released. We investigated the 
hypotheses that cultured juvenile fish released to a 
known nursery site would linger and make use of the 
nursery habitat or move directly off to other locations. 
Similarly, we investigated whether the wild fish taken 
from the site, tagged, and released back to the nursery 
would behave differently from the cultured fish. 
1 Okamoto, H. Y. 1993. Project to develop opakapaka (pink 
snapper) tagging technique to assess movement behavior. 
Final Report of the Hawaii Department of Land and Natu- 
ral Resources to NOAA, 18 p. NOAA Award No. NA90AA- 
D-IJ466. [Available from Division of Aquatic Resources, 
Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, 1151 
Punchbowl Street, Room 330, Honolulu, HI 96813-3088.] 
Materials and methods 
Study area 
The Kaneohe Bay nursery (Fig. 1) is a submerged ter- 
race, 70-100 m deep, roughly 8 km2 in area, and is 
separated from the nearest known aggregation of adult 
crimson jobfish by more than 5 km. Video surveys 
(Parrish et ah, 1997), backscatter data collected with 
a multibeam sonar (Dartnell and Gardner 2 ), and side- 
scan sonar data (C. Kelley, unpubl. data) indicate that 
the bottom at this nursery site is “soft” (unconsolidated 
sediment) and generally featureless. Two isolated, ex- 
posed rock ledges identified on the slope adjacent to 
the nursery were hypothesized to be potential transi- 
tion habitats for juveniles when they leave the nursery 
to emigrate to deeper, hardbottom adult habitat. 
Receivers 
We monitored the nursery ground with two VR2 3 pas- 
sive underwater receivers (VEMCO, Bedford, Canada), 
deployed in 2006 approximately 800 m apart at a depth 
of 75-80 m. Subsurface floats suspended the receivers 
5 m above the bottom to maximize reception of signals 
from tagged fish. This configuration reduced acoustic 
effects on signal reception from the thermocline (Sid- 
erius et al., 2007). Weighted with a concrete anchor, 
the receivers were fitted with an ORE Offshore SWR 
acoustic release transponder (EdgeTech, West Ware- 
ham, MA) that detached and allowed the receivers to 
float to the surface when a coded acoustic signal was 
transmitted. In 2007, 4 additional receivers were de- 
ployed at a depth of 140 m at sites on the adjacent 
slope (2 north and 2 south of the nursery), and each 
pair was split between soft bottom (sites 2 and 4) and 
rock ledge (sites 1 and 3) habitats (Fig. 1). The receiv- 
ers on the slope were separated from other receivers by 
distances ranging from 1200 to 2500 m. Attached to the 
bottom of each receiver mooring, a temperature data 
logger recorded temperatures on an hourly basis to 
track tidal effects of a cold bottom layer that had been 
identified at the Kaneohe nursery in previous studies 
(Moffitt and Parrish, 1996). 
Tagging of juvenile fish 
Cultured juveniles were raised in captivity from eggs 
spawned from broodstock held at the Hawaii Institute 
of Marine Biology (HIMB), a marine research center 
of the University of Hawaii at Manoa located on Co- 
2 Dartnell, P., and J. V. Gardner. 1999. Sea-floor images and 
data from multibeam surveys in San Francisco Bay, South- 
ern California, Hawaii, the Gulf of Mexico, and Lake Tahoe, 
California-Nevada. U.S. Geological Survey Digital Data Se- 
ries DDS-55, vers. 1.0. [Online version of interactive CD- 
ROM. Available at Website.] 
3 Mention of trade names or commercial companies is for iden- 
tification purposes only and does not imply endorsement by 
the National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA. 
