Abstract

Bonefish, Albula vulpes, are an ecologically, culturally, and economically important sportfish found throughout the flats habitats of The Bahamas. The economic importance of bonefish to The Bahamas—$169 million (USD) estimated annual economic impact (Smith et al. 2023)—and their near threatened conservation status (Adams et al. 2014) have made the species a focal point for conservation efforts. Bonefish use of coastal flats and mangrove-lined tidal creeks for foraging and movement corridors, and nearshore inner-reef habitats for pre-spawning aggregations, positions most of bonefish life history in sensitive locations that are vulnerable to anthropogenic impacts, such as coastal development and dredging of channels and marinas. The need to protect essential spawning and foraging habitats has aided in the establishment of five national parks, and expansion of one, on Abaco and Grand Bahama Island. Previous tagging studies have also been referenced to evaluate the effectiveness of current park boundaries, confirming the sufficiency of these boundaries for adults (Adams et al. 2021). However, nursery habitats have yet to be taken into consideration in this process. Bonefish nursery habitats are predominately low energy, unstructured, inter-tidal sand and mud-bottom shorelines (Haak et al. 2019). Here, we distill the work of Lombardo et al. (2022) to provide a framework for evaluating a marine protected area network’s capacity for protecting settled larvae from a known spawning area using biophysical larval dispersal models of observed spawning events.

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