The Contribution of Marine Protected Areas to Resilience and persistence in Marine Fish Species

Networks of no-take marine protected areas (MPAs, areas in which there is no fishing at all) have been widely recommended for the conservation of marine biodiversity. But for marine populations to gain resiliency and persistency that protect them from external factors which may cause declination of the population, individual MPAs must be simultaneously self-sustaining and adequately connected to other MPAs via larval dispersal. For marine species with a dispersive larval stage, populations within MPAs require either the return of settlement-stage larvae to their natal reserve or connectivity among reserves at the spatial scales at which MPA networks are implemented. Until now, larvae have not been tracked when dispersing from one MPA to the other, and the relative magnitude of local retention and connectivity among MPAs remains unknown. In this review, studies on the panda clownfish, the orange clownfish, the vagabond butterflyfish and weakfish provide the first estimates of connectivity in a marine fish species. The results show that populations are sustained by a significant amount of self-recruitment, but it also largely depends on larval dispersal from and to other populations within or outside the MPA boundaries. More generally, the knowledge from these studies provides new insights in MPA development, and hopefully adds to the resilience and persistence of marine fish species.