Knowledge of the three-dimensional movement patterns of elasmobranchs is vital to understand their ecological roles and exposure to anthropogenic pressures. To date, comparative studies among species at global scales have mostly focused on horizontal movements. Our study addresses the knowledge gap of vertical movements by compiling the first global synthesis of vertical habitat use by elasmobranchs from data obtained by deployment of 989 biotelemetry tags on 38 elasmobranch species. Elasmobranchs displayed high intra- and interspecific variability in vertical movement patterns. Substantial vertical overlap was observed for many epipelagic elasmobranchs, indicating an increased likelihood to display spatial overlap, biologically interact, and share similar risk to anthropogenic threats that vary on a vertical gradient. We highlight the critical next steps toward incorporating vertical movement into global management and monitoring strategies for elasmobranchs, emphasizing the need to address geographic and taxonomic biases in deployments and to concurrently consider both horizontal and vertical movements.

The recent Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) sets ambitious goals but no clear pathway for how zero loss of important biodiversity areas and halting human-induced extinction of threatened species will be achieved. We assembled a multi-taxa tracking dataset (11 million geopositions from 15,845 tracked individuals across 121 species) to provide a global assessment of space use of highly mobile marine megafauna, showing that 63% of the area that they cover is used 80% of the time as important migratory corridors or residence areas. The GBF 30% threshold (Target 3) will be insufficient for marine megafauna’s effective conservation, leaving important areas exposed to major anthropogenic threats. Coupling area protection with mitigation strategies (e.g., fishing regulation, wildlife-traffic separation) will be essential to reach international goals and conserve biodiversity.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) have become an increasingly important tool to protect and conserve marine resources. However, there remains much debate about how effective MPAs are, especially in terms of their ability to protect mobile marine species such as teleost and chondrichthyan fishes. We used satellite and acoustic tags to assess the ability of a large oceanic MPA, the British Indian Ocean Territory MPA (BIOT MPA), to protect seven species of pelagic and reef-associated teleost and chondrichthyan fishes. We satellite-tagged 26 animals from six species (Blue Marlin, Reef Mantas, Sailfish, Silky Sharks, Silvertip Sharks, and Yellowfin Tuna), producing 2,735 days of movement data. We also acoustically tagged 121 sharks from two species (Grey Reef and Silvertip Sharks), which were monitored for up to 40 months across a large acoustic receiver array spanning the MPA. We found that the activity spaces of all satellite-tagged animals, including pelagic species, were much smaller than the area of the BIOT MPA, even taking into account errors associated with position estimates. Estimates of space use of acoustically tagged sharks, based on dynamic Brownian Bridge Movement Models (dBBMM), were also much smaller than the size of the MPA. However, we found important limitations when using dBBMM and demonstrate its sensitivity to both study duration and array design. We found that Grey Reef Sharks should be monitored for at least 1 year and Silvertip Sharks for 2 years before their activity space can be effectively estimated. We also demonstrate the potentially important role that intraspecific variability in spatial ecology may play in influencing the ability of MPAs to effectively protect populations of mobile species. Overall, our results suggest that, with effective enforcement, MPAs on the scale of the BIOT MPA potentially offer protection to a variety of pelagic and reef species with a range of spatial ecologies. We suggest that animals need to be tagged across seasons, years, and ontogenetic stages, in order to fully characterize their spatial ecology, which is fundamental to developing and implementing effective MPAs to conserve the full life history of target species.

Vessel tracking and habitat modeling reveal hotspots of overlap between industrial fishing and the habitat of pelagic fishes.

Large, remote marine protected areas (MPAs) containing both reef and pelagic habitats, have been shown to offer considerable refuge to populations of reef‐associated sharks. Many large MPAs are, however, impacted by illegal fishing activity conducted by unlicensed vessels. While enforcement of these reserves is often expensive, it would likely benefit from the integration of ecological data on the mobile animals they are designed to protect. Consequently, shark populations in some protected areas continue to decline, as they remain a prime target for illegal fishers. To understand shark movements and their vulnerability to illegal fishing, 3 years of acoustic tracking data, from 101 reef‐associated sharks, were analysed as movement networks to explore the predictability of movement patterns and identify key movement corridors within the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) MPA. We examined how space use and connectivity overlap with spatially explicit risk of illegal fishing, through data obtained from the management consultancy enforcing the MPA. Using individual‐based models, the movement networks of two sympatric shark species were efficiently predicted with distance‐decay functions (>95% movements accurately predicted). Model outliers were used to highlight the locations with unexpectedly high movement rates where MPA enforcement patrols might most efficiently mitigate predator removal. Activity space estimates and network metrics illustrate that silvertip sharks were more dynamic, less resident and link larger components of the MPA than grey reef sharks. However, we show that this behaviour potentially enhances their exposure to illegal fishing activity. Synthesis and applications. Marine protected area (MPA) enforcement strategies are often limited by resources. The British Indian Ocean Territory MPA, one of the world's largest ‘no take’ MPAs, has a single patrol vessel to enforce 640,000 km² of open ocean, atoll and reef ecosystems. We argue that to optimize the patrol vessel search strategy and thus enhance their protective capacity, ecological data on the space use and movements of desirable species, such as large‐bodied reef predators, must be incorporated into management plans. Here, we use electronic tracking data to evaluate how shark movement dynamics influence species mortality trajectories in exploited reef ecosystems. In doing so we discuss how network analyses of such data might be applied for protected area enforcement.

The Cookiecutter shark (Isistius brasiliensis) is an ectoparasitic, mesopelagic shark that is known for removing plugs of tissue from larger prey, including teleosts, chondrichthyans, cephalopods, and marine mammals. Although this species is widely distributed throughout the world’s tropical and subtropical oceanic waters, like many deep-water species, it remains very poorly understood due to its mesopelagic distribution. We used a suite of biochemical tracers, including stable isotope analysis (SIA), fatty acid analysis (FAA), and environmental DNA (eDNA), to investigate the trophic ecology of this species in the Central Pacific around Hawaii. We found that large epipelagic prey constituted a relatively minor part of the overall diet. Surprisingly, small micronektonic and forage species (meso- and epipelagic) are the most important prey group for Cookiecutter sharks across the studied size range (17–43 cm total length), with larger mesopelagic species or species that exhibit diel vertical migration also being important prey. These results were consistent across all the tracer techniques employed. Our results indicate that Cookiecutter sharks play a unique role in pelagic food webs, feeding on prey ranging from the largest apex predators to small, low trophic level species, in particular those that overlap with the depth distribution of the sharks throughout the diel cycle. We also found evidence of a potential shift in diet and/or habitat with size and season. Environmental DNA metabarcoding revealed new prey items for Cookiecutter sharks while also demonstrating that eDNA can be used to identify recent prey in stomachs frozen for extended periods. Integrating across chemical tracers is a powerful tool for investigating the ecology of elusive and difficult to study species, such as meso- and bathypelagic chondrichthyans, and can increase the amount of information gained from small sample sizes. Better resolving the foraging ecology of these mesopelagic predators is critical for effective conservation and management of these taxa and ecosystems, which are intrinsically vulnerable to overfishing and exploitation.