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Swimming behavior of Chinese sturgeon in natural habitat as compared to that in a deep reservoir: preliminary evidence for anthropogenic impacts

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Abstract

Unusually deep water due to dam construction has the potential to negatively effect endangered sturgeons, which lack a physiological mechanism to inflate their swimbladder and may be unable to remain buoyant under high pressure at depth. In a previous study, some juvenile sturgeons released in a deep (>100 m) reservoir lost buoyancy and stayed nearly motionless on the bottom. However, it is not clear whether this behavior represents a negative effect of the dam, because natural sturgeon swimming behavior is unknown. In this study, we attached multi-sensor data loggers to nine wild adult Chinese sturgeons Acipenser sinensis in an unimpounded reach of the Yangtze River, China. The depth utilization, tail beating activity, swim speed, and body inclination of these fish were monitored for 1–3 days. Fish swam up and down successively in the water column (mean depth, 9.9 m) with a cycle of 100–1,000 s during 64 % of the time on average, and stayed at depth, presumably on the riverbed, during rest periods. Tail beats were continuous (mean frequency, 0.77 Hz) throughout the records, indicating that their buoyancy was maintained. These results contrast with the previous study, suggesting that the behavior observed in the reservoir is unusual and that deep water poses a risk of losing buoyancy for sturgeons. Furthermore, all fish intensively swam (maximum speed, 3.0 m s−1) to the river surface at a mean frequency of 0.35 times per hour—a behavior that could explain why ship strikes are a serious cause of mortality in sturgeons.

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Acknowledgements

We thank X. Chen, Y. Naito, and D. Yang for their assistance with the fieldwork. This work is funded by the Special Research Fund for the Commonweal of Society of the Ministry of Agriculture of China (200903048–02; 201203086), the Special Research Fund for the Beyond Plan of Agriculture Technology (2009Kua15), the Compensation Grant for Environmental Conservation of China Three Gorges Project Corporation (0714094, 0714907, 0799518), the program “Bio-logging Science of The University of Tokyo (UTBLS)”, Grant-in-Aids for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) (21681002), and Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows (to Y. Y. W.). Fieldworks were made with permission from the Ministry of Agriculture of China.

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Author notes

  1. Nobuyuki Miyazaki

    Present address: Ocean Policy Research Foundation, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 105-0001, Japan

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of Polar Research, Tachikawa, Tokyo, 190-8518, Japan

    Yuuki Y. Watanabe

  2. Key Laboratory of Freshwater Biodiversity Conservation, Ministry of Agriculture of China. Yangtze River Fisheries Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Fisheries Science, Wuhan, Hubei, 430223, China

    Qiwei Wei, Hao Du & Luoxin Li

  3. Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Chiba, 277-8564, Japan

    Yuuki Y. Watanabe & Nobuyuki Miyazaki

Authors
  1. Yuuki Y. Watanabe
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  2. Qiwei Wei
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  3. Hao Du
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  4. Luoxin Li
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  5. Nobuyuki Miyazaki
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qiwei Wei.

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Fig. S1

The whole record of swimming depth of the Chinese sturgeon “F”, and its spectrogram (indicative of periodicity in up-and-down movements) where magnitude is expressed by color. Periods with high periodicity are indicated by black bands at the bottom. (PDF 2.70 mb)

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Watanabe, Y.Y., Wei, Q., Du, H. et al. Swimming behavior of Chinese sturgeon in natural habitat as compared to that in a deep reservoir: preliminary evidence for anthropogenic impacts. Environ Biol Fish 96, 123–130 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-012-0019-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-012-0019-0

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