The heterogeneous spatial and temporal patterns of behavior of small pelagic fish in an array of Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs)

Identifying spatial and temporal patterns can reveal the driving factors that govern the behavior of fish in their environment. In this study, we characterized the spatial and temporal occupation of 37 acoustically tagged bigeye scads (Selar Crumenophthalmus) in an array of shallow Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs) to clarify the mechanism that leads fish to associate with FADs. A comparison of the number of visits and residence times exhibited by the fish at different FADs revealed a strong variability over the array of FADS, with the emergence of a leading FAD, which recorded the majority of visits and retained the fish for a longer period of time. We found diel variability in the residence times, with fish associated at daytime and exploring the array of FADs at nighttime. We demonstrated that this diel temporal pattern was amplified in the leading FAD. We identified a 24‐hour periodicity for a subset of individuals aggregated to the leading FAD, thus suggesting that those fish were able to find this FAD after night excursions. The modeling of fish movements based on a Monte Carlo sampling of inter‐FAD transitions revealed that the observed spatial heterogeneity in the number of visits could not be explained through simple array‐ connectivity arguments. Similarly, we demonstrated that the high residence times recorded at the leading FAD were not due to the spatial arrangement of individual fish having different associative characters. We discussed the relationships between these patterns of association with the FADs, the exploration of the FAD array and the possible effects of social interactions and environmental factors.