Fish movements have long intrigued ecologists due to their complexity and far-reaching implications on survival, reproduction, and population dynamics. Advancements in tracking technologies, including emerging electronic and remote sensors and information derived from molecular, chemical, and isotopic markers naturally recorded in fish tissues, have propelled our understanding of where, when, and why individuals and populations move. Such tangible information on the direction, frequency, and timing of fish movements is key to supporting management, informing policy, and underpinning positive conservation outcomes. In this chapter, we aim to highlight the diversity of movement and migration strategies in fish, providing a blueprint of movement types at different spatial and temporal scales, as well as key methodologies and emerging approaches for studying fish movements. The goal is to broaden our understanding of how and why fish move, illustrated by representative and well-established case studies ranging from hourly or daily time steps, such as vertical migrations, to ontogenetic movements linking different life-history stages, all the way to transoceanic movements and diadromous migrations.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2025
Pachacamac is a major precolumbian site located on Peru’s Central Coast. Covering approximately 6 km2, the site was occupied for over a thousand years before the Spanish conquest in the early sixteenth century. In 2012, the Ychsma Project discovered a unique Late Intermediate period (AD 900–1470) multiple burial (“Cx4”) made of two funerary chambers with a vegetal roof structure, containing over 110 intact and fragmentary deceased together with numerous grave goods. More than 60% of the individuals are subadults whose sex cannot be assigned using osteological observation. Among the adults, 23 females and 20 males were identified, and the sex of the remaining four individuals couldn’t be assigned with certainty. We aim to fully understand the sociobiology of the Cx4 population, including biological sex, using a combined bioarchaeology and molecular archaeology approach. Despite significant human modern contamination and low amounts of endogenous ancient DNA, our results show that sex could be assigned genetically in >70% of the cases, including subadults. Sex identification of infants, children and adolescents is crucial to fully understand this complex context and its funerary recruitment, and to perform an integrated and holistic analysis of all associated data.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2024
