Meeting Abstract

P3.95  Jan. 6  Evidence for DMSP as a Chemosensory Stimulant for Pelagic Jacks DEBOSE, JL**; NEVITT, GA; DITTMAN, AH; University of California, Davis; University of California, Davis; Northwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA-Fisheries, Seattle jldebose@ucdavis.edu

Pelagic fishes from the tropics are usually dispersed throughout the expanse of ocean waters. However, at predictable times, many of these fishes aggregate to spawn or forage over coral reefs. How these animals coordinate their aggregations is unclear, but one possibility is that they may recruit to olfactory cues associated with coral habitats. Recent work has shown that coral reefs can be significant production areas for dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) in the marine environment. DMSP is a chemical produced by marine algae and is commonly associated with secondary foraging on primary productivity in the ocean. Coral reefs also appear to produce DMSP in part through interactions between coral and their symbiotic zooxanthellae. We hypothesize that tropical pelagic fishes use spatial and temporal variation in DMSP as foraging cues to locate aggregation sites. Supporting this idea, we have previously shown that the abundance of pelagic jacks (Family Carangidae) was positively associated with elevations in DMSP levels over the Flower Garden Banks coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico. Here, we extend this work by examining whether two species of pelagic jacks, crevalle jack (Caranx hippos) and bluefin trevally (C. melampygus), can detect DMSP in a flow-through trough in the laboratory. Our results indicate that both crevalle jack and bluefin trevally respond behaviorally to ecologically-relevant concentrations of DMSP, providing further evidence that DMSP may be an important chemosensory cue for these species in the ocean.