Small sample sizes dominate recent acoustic telemetry studies of fish movements and migrations

Acoustic telemetry (AT) tracks fish movements across time and space but is constrained by high costs, challenges in capturing fish and obtaining sufficient data. A meta-analysis of AT studies completed between 2019 and 2023 extracted data on 584 records across 258 species. These revealed that 77% of AT studies tagged fewer than 100 individuals per species (median: 39), with 83% of tagged fish providing data used for movement analyses. These results suggest that AT studies can be limited in their ability to analyse fish movements and migrations at population levels.